Obituary: Fats Domino died on October 24th

THE fact that Fats Domino in 1957 played 355 shows in America, travelling 13,000 miles, was misleading. He never left New Orleans, or rather New Orleans never left him. The fact that he was praised by Elvis Presley as the real king of rock ’n’ roll, named as chief inspiration by Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, John Lennon and Neil Young, and hailed as the man who started a cultural revolution deemed so dangerous, in some parts of America, that bottles flew and fights started, was pretty mystifying to him. When the rage took off in the early 1950s, he had been playing that music in the honky-tonks and bars of the Big Easy for fully 15 years.