Chart position: #2 R&B
Category: R&B/boogie-woogie
Writers: Antoine Domino, Dave Bartholomew
Label and number: Imperial 5058, Los Angeles
Flipside:"Detroit City Blues"
When and where recorded: December 10, 1949, in New Orleans
When released: February 1950
Why important: It was the first of almost seventy Imperial records and
sixty-three R&B charters for Domino, and the first New Orleans hit that
sounded New Orleans and convinced record companies elsewhere to record local
musicians. Fats became the biggest-selling R&B artist of the '50s.
Influenced by: Champion
Jack Dupree's "Junket Blues" (1941)
Influenced: Jimmy Beasley, Willie Egan, Jerry Lee Lewis
The story behind the record: The J&M Studio, in the rear of the J&M
Record Shop on the corner of North Rampart and Dumaine streets in New Orleans,
didn't have much going for it. The studio was just a ten-by-twelve-foot room.
"That room was highly padded," the owner and engineer, Cosimo Matassa, told
writer Rick Coleman. "It had a carpeted floor and a jute type of underpad. [Most
of the walls were] soft cellutex acoustic boards on mounting strips. The ceiling
was cellutex too." The room had no echo, so music sounded dry and flat. Matassa
was often heavy-handed in balancing the instruments, and the lathe he used to
cut his master disks sometimes muddied the recordings. But J&M Studio had
a band that could really kick ass, and because it was a New Orleans band, there
was nothing like it anywhere else.
Thanks to singer Roy Brown and bandleader Paul Gayton, both of whom recorded for the DeLuxe label out of New York City, New Orleans had begun to develop a reputation as a town that was happening. Lew Chudd, who owned Imperial Records in Los Angeles, was itching at the time to diversify from the Mexican music his label was primarily known for, so he flew to the Louisiana city in hopes of getting in on the ground floor of its new R&B scene. His first act was to sign up a black, twenty-eight-year-old trumpeter bandleader named Dave Bartholomew as Imperial's A&R man. Bartholomew played on Dr. Daddy-O's radio show broadcasting out of the J&M Record Shop on weekends and led the house band in the backroom studio.
When Chudd asked him about the available talent around New Orleans, Bartholomew said, "Well, I've heard about a guy named Fats Domino playing at the Hideaway Club. They tell me he's terrific." That Friday night Bartholomew and Chudd went down to Desire Street and scouted the club where Fats was a pianist in bass player Billy Diamond's combo. "Fats was singing a song the prisoners used to sing, 'Junket's Blues,' you know, a song about the junkie," Bartholomew later told John Broven, author of Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans. "In December 1949 most people didn't know what the word meant . . . So I told Fats would he like to record, and introduced him to Lew and we went on from there."
A few days later Antoine Domino-whose nickname matched his five-footfive, 224-pound body, even though he had picked up the moniker from Billy Diamond in 1947 when he weighed only 160 poundsarrived at Cosimo Matassa's studio. Accompanying him was Bartholomew's eight-man band, which included Herb Hardesty and Alvin "Red" Tyler on saxes, Ernest McLain on guitar, Frank Fields on bass and Earl Palmer on drums. With only a few changes in personnel, this band would play behind Fats Domino for the next fifteen years. They cut eight songs that day in 1949. Chudd decided that the first one would be "Fat Man Blues"-a reworking of the old jailhouse lament, "Junket Blues," that Fats had been singing when Bartholomew walked into the Hideaway Club.
Champion Jack Dupree had recorded "Junket Blues" for Columbia Records' Okeh subsidiary label in 1941. Shortly before his death in early 1992, Dupree said he'd picked up the song from his "father," an early New Orleans pianist named Drive 'Em Down (Willie Hall), who never recorded it. Fats Domino had to clean the song up a little: Dupree's "they call me a junko'cause I'm loaded all the time" became "they call me the fat man, 'cause I weigh 200 pounds." Fats also deleted all of Dupree's references to needles, reefers and cocaine. (Professor Longhair later expropriated the melody of "Junket Blues" for his popular "Tipitina"; so did Lloyd Price when he wrote "Lawdy Miss Clawdy.")
"The Fat Man"-the title that Chudd replaced "Fat Man Blues" with on the record label-has an odd structure even for a New Orleans R&B song. The recording begins with Fats pounding out a few bars of Professor Longhair-flavored boogie on his upright piano before bragging about himself, "They call me the fat man'cause I weigh 200 pounds, all the girls they love me'cause I know my way around; I was standing, I was standing on the corner of Rampart and Canal, I was watching, I was watching all the great of gals." Nothing spectacular or moving, certainly, until Fats imitates a muted trumpet-"wah wah wah wah"-in a falsetto voice for sixteen bars, and rolls out another twenty bars of boogie piano before coming back with one last verse of nonsense lyrics.
Bartholomew wasn't sure about the recording at first because it sounded distorted. "The sax was too harsh, and I really was responsible for it because I couldn't play trumpet as I was in the control room. So what happened, Fats played loud at the piano, we made a mistake and sent the record out. The piano was much higher than anything else, we really didn't want it that way, but at the time we couldn't do anything about it."
Part of the problem was that the studio had only three electrical outlets-and three microphones. Matassa assigned one mike to the piano, forcing the saxophone players to belly up to it from the side. The guitarist and bassist shared a second mike, and Fats sang directly into the third. Drummer Earl Palmer had to pound his kit loud enough to bleed into all three mikes from across the little room. No wonder Matassa had a problem properly balancing Fats and the band.
As it turned out, though, the distorted, bass-heavy piano, counterbalanced against Fats's high-pitched scat vocals, sold the record. Imperial boasted that it sold 10,000 copies in the first ten days in New Orleans alone. "The Fat Man" eventually became the first of Fats Domino's accredited twenty-two-million-selling records. It also established New Orleans R&B as an important, distinct sound that would shape black music for the next decade. Earl Palmer described their rhythm as a "regional New Orleans thing. It was hard eighths and it wasn't a Louis Jordan shuffle . . . It was sort of a new approach to rhythm music." As Palmer told Max Weinberg, "You could always tell a New Orleans drummer the minute you heard him play his bass drum because he'd have that parade beat connotation."
Fats Domino's session, Palmer recalled, demanded that he play his drums differently than ever before. He was used to knocking out various rhythms on jazz, bebop, even Dixieland numbers, but "The Fat Man" required a strong "afterbeat throughout the whole piece," whereas "with Dixieland you had a strong afterbeat only after you got to the shout [last] chorus." Palmer would later add his quick-footed backbeat to many seminal recordings, including Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and most of Little Richard's hits.
Antoine Domino, Jr., was born in New Orleans' Ninth Ward on February 28, 1928, the youngest child of a part-time violinist who had grown up in a rural French-speaking settlement on the Mississippi River. (Antoine himself grew up speaking English in a heavy Creole dialect indigenous to parts of New Orleans.) When Antoine was still a boy, his sister's husband, a Dixieland musician named Harrison Verret, taught him to play the piano by writing the notes on the keys. "Once he showed me the chords, I knew I could play with just'bout any band," Domino said later.
Earl Palmer recalled that "The Fat Man" required the young homebody to leave the safety of New Orleans for the first time in his life-reluctantly. "Fats kept hiding from us. He didn't want to go. It took us three days to get him out on tour. Finally Dave [Bartholomew] got hold of him on the phone and said, `People are gonna sue if you don't make this trip: That finally got Fats Domino out on tour."
One of Domino's early heroes was pianist-songwriter-humorist Thomas "Fats" Waller, who died in 1943, and there's no doubt that Domino picked up much of his easy humor from Waller. (Later on, in fact, a movie producer considered him to star in a film bio of Waller's life, according to Rick Coleman.) A later influence was Amos Milburn, a Texas boogie-woogie artist who recorded over a dozen R&B hits between early 1949 and 1951. But Dave Bartholomew insists that the man who shaped Domino's relaxed style was pianist-singer Charles Brown, who from 1946 to 1951 was one of the R&B world's most popular artists. "Fats wanted to copy Charles Brown, but he didn't have Charles's diction, and he wasn't a polished piano player like Charles. Fats could only play boogiewoogie. But he played the best boogie-woogie on earth."
Despite the popularity of "The Fat Man," Domino's follow-up records from the same marathon session all flopped. Not until the middle of 1952 did be get back on track with "Goin' Home," and then of course there was no stopping him. Part of it had to do with his toning down his style, forsaking the New Orleans boogie of "The Fat Man" for the soft triplets-which he picked up from Texas pianist Little Willie Littlefield -that were his trademark later on. Fats Domino became the biggest selling R&B entertainer of the 1950s and appeared in several of the best known rock 'n' roll films, including The Girl Can't Help It. His name inspired such aberrations as Chubby Checker, Tubby Chess and Pudgy Parchesi.
Domino rerecorded "The Fat Man" in Nashville, with Nashville pickers, around 1964 after he joined ABC Paramount Records. His diction didn't sound as muddy as on the original. A harmonica stood in for Fats' vocal "wah wahs," an electric bass replaced the old stand-up doghouse, and another pianist (possibly James Booker) boogied in Fats's stead-and of course the recording was in bright, crisp stereo. Compared to the crude and murky original, it sounded terrible.
Bartholomew, who still leads Fats Domino's band, insists that what really made Fats popular during the rock 'n' roll era was his warm voice and its French Creole intonations. "We all thought of him as a country and western singer."
"I consider ["The Fat Man"] a revolutionary record, we really perked up when we heard that shit, cause in those days-we didn't know it-but there was a whole new art form brewing."-Johnny Otis, bandleader
"I think the first rock 'n' roll pianist was Fats Domino."-Nicky Hopkins, pianist