"The Greatest Hits of Fats Domino" has a place in this blogger's music library on his iPhone. Today, that selection will play on shuffle as the blogger's drives about on the day's business. And, very likely the blogger — from the driver's seat — will sing along with the greatest rock'n roll piano player — ever. If this is a (fair & balanced) tribute to greatness, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
The Inescapable Fats Domino
By Amanda Petrusich
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
The moments in my life in which I experience the least complicated kinds of joy are usually when I’m listening to a record by a piano player from New Orleans: Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, Tuts Washington, Champion Jack Dupree, Allen Toussaint, and, especially, Fats Domino. I can’t explain the alchemy—let the biologists map out precisely what happens on a chemical level. It doesn’t matter how leaden or battered I might have been feeling before—how encumbered by my own cynicism, how spiritually ransacked. There’s an exuberance inherent to this music that is purely, mystifyingly transformative. In an instant, everything lightens.
Domino—who was born Antoine Domino, Jr., in 1928—passed away Tuesday, of natural causes, at his daughter’s home, in Harvey, Louisiana. He was eighty-nine. Domino was the youngest of eight kids, born into a French Creole family in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He dropped out of elementary school after fourth grade, and taught himself how to play the piano by listening to other people’s records. At nineteen, he was nicknamed Fats by the bandleader Billy Diamond, who thought his style was reminiscent of the work of Fats Waller, a jazz pianist from Harlem. In 1949, while working in a mattress factory, Domino cut his first 78-RPM record, at J&M, a studio on Rampart Street. “The Fat Man” was released by Imperial Records that December. It’s widely considered one of the first rock-and-roll records ever made. (It predates Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” by six years and Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” by two years, though it came after Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” from 1946, and Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” from 1948.)
“The Fat Man” sold like crazy—a million copies by 1951. It’s based on “Junker’s Blues,” a song recorded by Dupree, in 1940, for Okeh Records. (“Junker’s Blues” was likely written in the nineteen-twenties by a barrelhouse pianist named Willie Hall, who was better known by his nickname, Drive ’Em Down; it also later became the foundation of Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina.”)
Domino does something startling with Hall’s melody. Now that rock and roll has become such a familiar and comfortable idiom in America, it’s hard to quantify “The Fat Man” ’s singularity, or its wildness—to truly lock eyes with its newness would require unhearing all the various ways in which Domino’s work has since been synthesized and perverted and mimicked and reborn. (Such is the plight of the true innovator.) But I’d still challenge anyone to make it through the bit after the second verse—in which Domino begins to scat in falsetto, approximating the wah-wah-wah sound of a muted Dixieland trumpet—and not be left at least slightly agog. It’s a nonverbal, nonsensical chorus that’s not exactly a chorus, yet is somehow a flawless chorus—effervescent, unexpected, profuse.
Domino sold sixty-five million singles in the intervening decades and made twenty-three records that went gold. Even when he was singing about heartache, as he often did, his songs seemed buoyed by some unwavering belief in the glory of love. It’s nearly impossible to find a photo of him in which he’s not smiling—I like to think that he flashed that deeply credible, no-bullshit grin every single day of his life. He was cherubic and stout, at five feet five. Sometimes, when looking at old photographs of American musical visionaries, there’s something in the physiology that seems to suggest a kind of inevitable virtuosity—Robert Johnson holding his guitar, say. You see the way his hands land on the instrument, the long and elegant curl of his fingers. Watching Domino’s stubby fingers alight on a keyboard, though—nothing about it makes sense. In 1956, he appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” playing his lonesome, loping hit, “Blueberry Hill.” I’ve watched the clip dozens of times, and I still can’t figure out the way his hands move so freely and so gently over the keys, as if he’s not even pressing down. As if he merely charms the song into being. # # #
[Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records (2014). See other books by Amanda Petrusich here. Petrusich teaches courses in writing about pop music and pop culture criticism at the Gallatin School of New York University. She received a BA (English & film studies) from The College of William and Mary and an MFA (nonfiction writing) from Columbia University.]
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