When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, much was made of the fact that the worst-hit neighborhoods were those inhabited mostly by poor blacks. But as the news unfolded, a specific question bounced through the country concerning one particularly rich and famous resident of the Lower Ninth Ward: "Where's Fats?"
To be sure, not everyone knew Fats Domino was still alive in 2005. The 77-year-old musician had made relatively few appearances in recent decades, especially outside New Orleans. His numerous hits seemed to belong to a distant era. Though his seminal importance to rock and other forms of popular music had made him one of the original inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and despite having dominated the charts for a chunk of the last century, Antoine "Fats" Domino seemed to have been, if not forgotten, relegated to the sidelines of music history.
Katrina briefly shone the national spotlight on Domino as nothing had since President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of the Arts in 1998. But Rick Coleman's biography of the star, Blue Monday (now out in trade paperback), should play a more permanent role in preserving Domino's legacy than any award or honor (or national disaster). It's a fairly well written, densely researched account of the long and colorful life of one of popular music's most influential and original talents.
In his Prologue, Coleman makes this very cogent point:
Historians...love to romanticize the stark noncommercial purity of downtrodden delta bluesmen in a commendable attempt at black cultural appreciation that nonetheless seems to rationalize the ghettoizing of many of rock 'n' roll's more direct black fathers and mothers - the creators of rhythm & blues - into a historical no-man's land. Thus, there has been vast documentation of the blues, but so little research on rhythm & blues that even major figures have disappeared into shadow. It is not a good sign of the preservation of African American heritage when by far the most popular r&b artists of the 1940s and the 1950s, Louis Jordan and Fats Domino, are today little known to most people.The book makes a major contribution towards redressing that injustice.
Race is a huge part of the story. From the relative cultural comfort of the 21st century it's easy to remark on how music has helped "bring us together." We forget how recently the Civil Rights movement spawned violence in many parts of the country, and we may not be aware of how much racial prejudice music and musicians suffered during Fats Domino's heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, and even into the 1970s.
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