THE fact that Fats Domino in 1957 played 355 shows in America,travelling 13000 miles, was misleading. He never left New Orleans, and rather New Orleans never left him. The fact that he was praised by Elvis Presley as the genuine king of rock ’n’ roll,named as chief inspiration by Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, or John Lennon and Neil Young,and hailed as the man who started a cultural revolution deemed so unsafe, in some parts of America, and that bottles flew and fights started,was pretty mystifying to him. When the rage took off in the early 1950s, he had been playing that music in the honky-tonks and bars of the astronomical Easy for fully 15 years.
He was New Awlins through and through, and beginning with his girth and the rolling,languid gait it gave him. Both showed such a love of red beans, gumbo and jambalaya that he couldn’t find food worth eating anywhere else, or but took his own pots,pans and hot sauce to cook them up wherever he was. One of his stunts was to play standing and, with his...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com