The title song began, “All over the country, people want to know / Whatever happened to Fats Domino,” then continued, “I’m alive and kicking and I’m where I wanna be.” Domino released “Alive and Kickin,’ ” his first album in more than a decade. Domino’s home in 2006 in recognition of New Orleans’s cultural resilience that same year, Mr. His rescue was loosely the basis for “Saving Fats,” a tall tale in Sam Shepard’s 2010 short-story collection, “Day Out of Days.” I could feel it, that it was a hit, a good record.” I told him I wasn’t gonna make no more records till they put that record out. “I liked that record ’cause I heard it by Louis Armstrong and I said, ‘That number gonna fit me,’ ” he told Offbeat.
2 on the pop charts and sold a reported three million copies. Domino had his biggest hit in 1956 with his version of “Blueberry Hill,” a song that had been recorded by Glenn Miller’s big band in 1940. Domino, who was in the room, and said, “There’s the real king of rock ’n’ roll.” I’ve been playing it for 15 years in New Orleans.”Īt a news conference in Las Vegas in 1969, after resuming his performing career, Elvis Presley interrupted a reporter who had called him “the king.” He pointed to Mr.
Domino answered: “Well, what they call rock ’n’ roll now is rhythm and blues. “Fats, how did this rock ’n’ roll all get started anyway?” an interviewer for a Hearst newsreel asked him in 1957. He did not flaunt his status as an innovator, or as an architect of a powerful cultural movement. Appearances on national television, on Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan’s shows, put him in millions of living rooms. Domino’s appeal to white teenagers broadened as he embarked on national tours and appeared with mixed-race rock ’n’ roll revues like the Moondog Jubilee of Stars Under the Stars, presented by the disc jockey Alan Freed at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. 1 hit for Pat Boone as “Ain’t That a Shame,” while Domino’s arrangement of a traditional song, “Bo Weevil,” was imitated by Teresa Brewer. In that racially segregated era, white performers used his hits to build their careers. His records began reaching the pop charts as well. Domino turned out a stream of hits, taking up what seemed like permanent residence in the upper reaches of the R&B charts. And whatever he was doing, nobody could beat him.” He added: “My first impression was a lasting impression. When you saw Fats Domino, it was ‘Let’s have a party!’ ” “He was singing and playing the piano and carrying on. Bartholomew told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2010. “Fats was breaking up the place, man,” Mr. Domino soon became the band’s frontman and a local draw. In his teens, he started working at a club called the Hideaway with a band led by the bassist Billy Diamond, who nicknamed him Fats. “In the houses where people had a piano in their rooms, I’d stop and play,” he told USA Today in 2007. Macarty School but dropped out in the fourth grade to work as an iceman’s helper. “I used to hear ’em, listen at ’em five, six, seven, eight times and I could play it just like the record because I had a good ear for catchin’ notes and different things.” “Back then I used to play everybody’s records everybody’s records who made records,” he told the New Orleans music magazine Offbeat in 2004. He was almost entirely self-taught, picking up ideas from boogie-woogie masters like Meade Lux Lewis, Pinetop Smith and Amos Milburn. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. Nobody can sing that music like colored people. “But rock ’n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. “A lot of people seem to think I started this business,” Presley told Jet magazine in 1957. He sold 65 million singles in those years, with 23 gold records, making him second only to Elvis Presley as a commercial force. Domino had more than three dozen Top 40 pop hits through the 1950s and early ’60s, among them “Blueberry Hill,” “Ain’t It a Shame” (also known as “Ain’t That a Shame,” which is the actual lyric), “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Walkin’ to New Orleans.” Throughout he displayed both the buoyant spirit of New Orleans, his hometown, and a droll resilience that reached listeners worldwide. His death was confirmed by the Jefferson Parish coroner’s office. Fats Domino, the New Orleans rhythm-and-blues singer whose two-fisted boogie-woogie piano and nonchalant vocals, heard on dozens of hits, made him one of the biggest stars of the early rock ’n’ roll era, died on Tuesday at his home in Harvey, La., across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
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