Rock ’n’ roll’s Fats Domino effect
Genuine music original, dead at 89
Popular perception maintains the rock ’n’ roll revolution appeared out of nowhere. Where there was once only Perry Como and Doris Day, suddenly the music arrived in 1955 in the ringing of Chuck Berry’s guitar on “Maybellene,” the swagger of Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” and the “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop alop-bam-boom” of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” If that’s true, what are we to do with Fats Domino?
Way back in the 1940s, Fats Domino, who died yesterday at the age of 89, began spinning out rock ’n’ roll magic. When Antoine Domino Jr. was punching the clock at a mattress factory and spending nights behind a piano on New Orleans bandstands, nobody called the music rock ’n’ roll. But take a listen to his first hit, the 1949 boogie-woogie piano stomp “The Fat Man,” and it’s all there: Berry’s keen sense of melody, Elvis Presley’s swagger and Little Richard’s manic joy.
Through the early ’50s, if you were black and played rock ’n’ roll, they called it blues or R&B. If you were white, they called it country or rockabilly. But thanks to such visionaries as Domino, the color barriers came down.
As early as 1952, with the slow, swampy mojo of “Goin’ Home,” he had crossed over to Billboard charts typically reserved for white artists. By 1955, with the revolution in full bloom, Domino became a hitmaker second only to Elvis.
With “Ain’t That a Shame,” he began a string of hits that became the soundtrack to a generation of teenagers, black and white. Often those hits sprang from Domino’s fleet fingers and knack for tight, magnetic hooks. With producer Dave Bartholomew, he wrote “Shame,” “I’m Walkin’,” “I’m in Love Again” and many more. But Domino also had a talent for adapting a diverse range of material to his trademark piano triplets and lazy, captivating vocal style.
One of his signature songs, “Blueberry Hill,” had almost become a jazz standard by 1956 — Louis Armstrong did it as a syrupy ballad in 1949. But Domino’s version of the song erased every previous version. Those triplets and woebegone vocals made it forever a Fats Domino song. And he did this over and over again: Listen to his bopping take on “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” or his juicedup cover of “My Blue Heaven.”
The genre evolved away from three-minute gems, but not before Domino racked up more than three dozen Top 40 singles between 1953 and 1963. Those singles eventually sold 65 million copies.
Domino played an integral role in crossing color lines and unifying the world behind rock ’n’ roll. And he did it the oldfashioned way: He wrote and performed a catalog so captivating, the world had no choice but to stand up, take notice and dance.