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On Fats Domino's Left Hand

RIP.

I heard a newscaster ask "how does a guy named nicknamed 'Fats' live to age 89?"

Fair question. Diet and exercise, not so much. Genetics mostly, and or something in the Jumbo I guess.



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By Charles P. Pierce

Oct 25, 2017

There are only a few things in this life of which I am certain. This is one of them.

New Orleans piano is the best piano. Period.

From Jelly Roll Morton and Tuts Washington, to Willie (The Lion) Smith and Huey (Piano) Smith, to James Booker and Professor Longhair, from Champion Jack Dupree down to Allen Toussaint and Dr. John and Henry Butler, to the utter joyful madness that is Bobby Lounge, through whoever comes next, New Orleans piano is the place where the great mongrel mix of American music most vividly comes together and then explodes out into every direction.

(Vladimir Horowitz once pronounced himself astonished by the way the 18-year old James Booker played.) It came out of the joints and whorehouses into jazz. Into blues. Into rock and roll. Into the world.

Fats Domino was a New Orleans piano player.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2...y5WM1xYbGo

He spoke French coming up at home. He had some huge hits that did nothing but make you smile so hard that you might miss how powerful that left hand was, and how his right hand went filigree-ing off toward glory. It is entirely possible that he never made a bad recording in his life.

He sold 65 million records and 23 of his records went gold. He became a kind of symbol, but he was never the jolly, roly-poly cartoon people made of him. (I can’t be the only one who noticed that the piano player in the bar during the “Pottersville” section of It’s A Wonderful Life” looks like one Fats or another, either Waller or Domino.)

There was too much power in that left hand. A lot of his early stuff is forgotten but, in it, you can hear where he got what he played, and everything that the people who came after him got from him, history like a big old river, rolling out from one set of fingertips to another.

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