Skip to main content

Fats

By



I'm surprised Trump didn't find a way to politicize the death of Fats Domino.  He politicized almost everything else last week including what should have been a simple Halloween trick or treat session with the kids of the White House press corps.

Many already thought Fats Domino was long gone until he was discovered in flooded New Orleans.  He had been awarded a National Medal of Arts by Bill Clinton in 1998, but Fats had pretty much disappeared from the music scene.  He wasn't touring.  There appeared to be little interest in his music with only a handful of compilations available on CD.  There was no great tribute band for him like there had been for Chuck Berry, B.B. King and others from his era.  Fats was living a quiet life in the lower ninth ward until Katrina hit.

His rescue became front page news and soon artists were scrambling to put together a tribute to him, releasing Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, which included Robert Plant, Elton John, Paul McCartney among many others.  He put out a new album of his own, Alive and Kicking, showing he still had the groove in him after all those lost years.

It's really amazing that one of the pioneer figures in rock and roll music could be forgotten, but this is what happens when you have a 25 year gap between albums.  Even his 1981 album was no more than a compilation of hits.  He hadn't released anything new since the early 70s.

Not like B.B. King and Chuck Berry were doing anything new, but they were both very active with Eric Clapton and Keith Richards putting together albums for them, and assembling star-studded bands to back them up.  You have to make yourself visible if you want to be seen.

After the 2007 tribute album, Fats was pretty much forgotten again, but at least he enjoyed a small measure of comfort in his waning years.  His house had been rebuilt.  A few of his possessions restored.  He still garnered attention in New Orleans.  The home town Saints were not going to let him go out without making a special tribute, which they wore in this past Sunday's game.

Now that the city has taken down its Civil War memorials, there should be place for one of its truly great native sons.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more