ROCK ’N’ ROLL BEGAN SO LONG AGO NOW THAT ITS genesis is practically the stuff of myth. But Fats Domino, who died on Oct. 24 at age 89, wasn’t just there at the beginning: he was one of its beginnings, a veritable human bridge between the traditional rhythms of New Orleans and all—Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson and Prince—that would come after.
The man who would became Fats Domino was born Antoine Dominique Domino Jr., the youngest of eight, in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the city he called home his entire life. His first recording, “The Fat Man,” released in 1949, showed an artist both radically, dangerously free and completely in control—it’s a sassy, rollicking walk of a record. From…
