Domino’s upbringing in the Lower Ninth Ward, surrounded by his Creole relatives, inflected his music. His father was descended from French-speaking African Americans who lived as enslaved and then freedpeople in Louisiana’s sugar parishes. Like many Louisiana Creoles, black and white, they had roots in Haiti. When the Dominos arrived in the Lower Nine, the neighborhood was still mostly rural, with unpaved streets, farm animals, and scarce electricity and indoor plumbing. In a recent radio show devoted to Domino, writer Ben Sandmel observed the artist’s “Caribbean vocal style” in songs like “My Blue Heaven.” “It’s almost like he’s an English as a second language speaker. It’s a very thick regional accent,” Sandmel said. “If you listen to oral histories of people [from the Lower Nine] who recorded around that time there are a lot of thick accents and a lot of French-isms in the speech.”
When he combined his Creole influences with New Orleans’s distinctive eight-bar blues, Domino changed the course of American music. He sold 65 million records, more than any other musician in the 1950s besides Elvis Presley. Though Presley was proclaimed the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he freely admitted that African Americans in New Orleans like Fats Domino were playing it first as “rhythm and blues.” Domino’s wild popularity in Jamaica also inspired the creation of ska and reggae. But fame and influence, of course, did not exempt him from the hurricane.
At the time of the disaster, many outsiders were surprised that so many poor, mostly black people had no means of evacuating the city. But even long-time New Orleanians with means, Fats included, chose to wait it out, as was their custom. Domino had to be rescued by boat, taken to the Superdome, and then evacuated to Baton Rouge. Because everyone knew where Domino lived, many assumed he had died in the flood; one misinformed soul even painted “R.I.P. Fats” on the front of his house. In an odd way, the 24 odd hours when Domino seemed to be “missing” became the focus of anxiety for many New Orleanians who had lost track of friends and relatives. According to curator Bruce Raeburn, for many observers of Katrina’s aftermath “musicians represented what was best about the city, so their fate became the gauge of both loss and recovery.”