Soon, the Domino-Bartholomew songwriting partnership was born and would prove to be one of the most successful in those early years of the Rock N’ Roll era. In 1949, songwriter Dave Bartholomew saw him play and brought recording man Lew Chudd to The Hideaway where he immediately signed Fats to his label, Imperial Records. Domino soon became the band’s frontman and a local draw. He was a regular at The Hideaway, a local music spot, with a band led by the bassist Billy Diamond, who nicknamed him Fats. He dropped out of school in the fourth grade to work as an iceman’s helper, but continued playing piano whenever he had the chance. “I used to hear ’em, listen at ’em five, six, seven, eight times and I could play it just like the record because I had a good ear for catchin’ notes and different things.” “Back then I used to play everybody’s records everybody’s records who made records,” he told the New Orleans music magazine Offbeat in 2004. He was almost entirely self-taught, picking up ideas from boogie-woogie masters like Meade Lux Lewis, Pinetop Smith and Amos Milburn.

At a very young age, he showed an interest in an old upright piano that a cousin had left with the family for safe-keeping, and soon he was playing it well enough to become a young keyboardist in local honky-tonks. Fats followed the musical lead of his father who was a violinist, and an uncle who was a horn player. Born in New Orleans on February 26, 1928, Antoine ('Fats') Domino Jr., was one of eight children in the Domino clan.

Fats domino children