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Episode 26: “Ain’t That A Shame” by Fats Domino

Episode 26: “Ain’t That A Shame” by Fats Domino

FromA History of Rock Music in 500 Songs


Episode 26: “Ain’t That A Shame” by Fats Domino

FromA History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

ratings:
Released:
Apr 1, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Welcome to episode twenty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Fats Domino and "Ain't That A Shame". Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

The best compilation of Fats Domino's music is a four-CD box set called They Call Me The Fat Man: The Legendary Imperial Recordings.

Pretty much all the information in this episode comes from Rick Coleman's Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock 'n' Roll. I've leaned on that rather more than I normally lean on a single source for this episode, because it's the only biography of Domino I know of, and we're looking at Domino in more depth than most other artists we've looked at so far.

I reference two previous episodes here. Those are episode eight on The Fat Man, and episode twelve, on Lawdy Miss Clawdy.

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Transcript

Today, for the third time, we're going to look at the collaborations between Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew, and Cosimo Matassa, and the way they brought New Orleans music into the R&B and rock and roll genres. It's been a few months since we talked about them, so you might want to refresh your memory by listening to episode eight, on "The Fat Man", and episode twelve, on "Lawdy Miss Clawdy".

After his brief split from Imperial Records, and thus from working with Fats Domino, Dave Bartholomew had returned to Imperial after Domino helped him on "Lawdy Miss Clawdy", and the two of them resumed their collaboration.

The first new track they recorded together was an instrumental called "Dreaming", featuring members of both Domino's touring band and of Bartholomew's studio band. It's credited on the label to Bartholomew as a writer, but other sources have the instrumental being written by Domino:

[excerpt: Fats Domino, "Dreaming"]

Whoever wrote it, the most popular hypothesis seems to be that the song was written as a tribute to Domino's manager, Melvin Cade, who had died only five days before the session. Domino had been sleeping in the back of Cade's car, as Cade had been speeding to get them to a show that they were late for. Cade had lost control of the car, which had been thrown ten feet into the air in a collision. Domino and the other passengers were uninjured, but Cade died of his injuries.

While this was obviously tragic, it turned out to be to Domino's benefit -- Domino's contract with Cade had given Domino only a hundred and fifty dollars a day from his shows, with Cade keeping the rest -- which might often be several times as much money. With Cade's death, Domino was free from that contract, and so the beginning of September 1952, with the death of Cade and the renewal of Domino and Bartholomew's partnership, marks the start of the second phase of Fats Domino's career.

One of the things we've touched on in the previous podcasts about Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino is the strained nature of their songwriting partnership -- although this is using "strained" in a fairly loose sense, given that they continued working with each other for decades. But like with so many musical partnerships where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, both men did consider their own contribution to be the more important. Bartholomew considered himself to be the more important writer because he came up with literate stories with narrative arcs and punchlines, coupled with sophisticated musical ideas, while Domino considered himself more important because he came up with relatable, simple, ideas and catchy hooks.

And, of course, Domino's piano style and distinctive voice were crucial in the popularity of the records, just as Dave Bartholomew's arrangement and production ideas were.

And the difference in their attitudes shows up in, for example,
Released:
Apr 1, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

Andrew Hickey presents a history of rock music from 1938 to 1999, looking at five hundred songs that shaped the genre.