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Dave Bartholomew.
‘I invented the big beat’ ... Dave Bartholomew in 1950. Photograph: Gilles Petard/Redferns
‘I invented the big beat’ ... Dave Bartholomew in 1950. Photograph: Gilles Petard/Redferns

Dave Bartholomew: a giant who taught the world to rock'n'roll

This article is more than 4 years old

The man who discovered Fats Domino has died aged 100, leaving over 4,000 songwriting credits and a fantastic legacy

Dave Bartholomew has died in New Orleans aged 100. While his passing is unlikely to attract the kind of accolades given to many deceased musicians, Bartholomew was a giant, a man who helped shape the sound and direction of both rhythm and blues and rock’n’roll while indirectly helping shape ska and, much later, rap. Bartholomew liked to state, “I invented the big beat”, and this was no idle boast: if any one musician can be given credit for shaping the sound of the US after the second world war, it was Bartholomew.

Bartholomew was born in Edgard, Louisiana, in 1918: a small town whose African American populace worked in sugar mills or on the docks servicing the river boats. Bartholomew’s father played tuba with jazz bands, shifting the family to New Orleans in 1933, where he worked on river boats and in bars. Here, the musically precocious youth began playing trumpet in local jazz and brass bands. He served in the US military during the war, returning to New Orleans in November 1945. Forming his own band, Dave Bartholomew and the Dew Droppers – named after the locally famous black music hotel and nightclub, The Dew Drop Inn – Bartholomew forged rhythm and blues out of jump blues and swing. A local reporter wrote of Bartholomew’s band in 1947: “Putting it mildly, they made the house ‘rock.’” Within a decade the western world would be rocking to Bartholomew’s sound.

In 1947, Bartholomew made his debut record for DeLuxe Records. It sold well locally and he scored his first national hit in 1949 with the suggestive Country Boy. That same year, while playing in Houston, Texas, Bartholomew was approached on the bandstand by Lew Chudd of Imperial Records, a fledgling, Los Angeles-based independent record label then concentrating on selling Mexican records; Chudd asked Bartholomew if he would be interested in working with him.

Soon Bartholomew would serve as Imperial’s New Orleans A&R man – scouting and signing talent, then producing, arranging, often songwriting for and playing on the sessions. In 1949, Imperial’s first two R&B chart hits both featured Bartholomew’s many talents: Jewel King’s 3 x 7 = 21 and Fats Domino’s The Fat Man. Bartholomew had found Domino playing in local bars and recognised the portly youth’s star quality: together the two men adapted Junker’s Blues, a song about heroin addiction, into The Fat Man. Lew Chudd initially hated it but it was an immediate hit with black listeners, selling over a million copies. The Fat Man is now often called “the first rock’n’roll record”.

Bartholomew left Imperial in 1950 after a dispute over money and concentrated on making his own records, cutting the street party anthem Shrimp and Gumbo, proto-rap The Monkey and the innuendo-laden My Ding A Ling (the tune Chuck Berry would make his only ever UK No 1 in 1972) while also producing Lloyd Price’s 1952 debut single Lawdy Miss Clawdy (a R&B No 1 that would soon be recorded by everyone from Elvis Presley and the Beatles to the Replacements and Lemmy). Imperial lured Bartholomew back in 1952 and, in 1955, he and Domino would set off on an extended run of hits – Dave producing and co-writing the songs and leading a band that featured several musicians now hailed as pioneers (drummer Earl Palmer, saxophonist Lee Allen, and guitarist Walter “Papoose” Nelson). They made Fats a superstar and introduced the world to New Orleans R&B.

Fats Domino, centre right, shakes hands with Dave Bartholomew, left, at the 50th anniversary observance of Domino’s first recording session in New Orleans, December 1999. Photograph: Jennifer Zdon/AP

Bartholomew kept busy throughout the 1950s, issuing both his own records and producing/writing others – these include Smiley Lewis’s One Night (later a hit for Elvis Presley) and I Hear You Knocking (a 1970 UK No 1 for Dave Edmunds) and Shirley & Lee’s Let the Good Times Roll (producer/band leader only). In Jamaica, Bartholomew’s productions were hugely popular and early ska developed directly from New Orleans R&B.

The British Invasion that began with the Beatles in late 1963 shifted listeners away from the warm, horn-heavy New Orleans music Bartholomew specialised in, and Chudd sold Imperial to Liberty Records that same year. Bartholomew continued to work as a producer and band leader – once Domino began touring the world it was Bartholomew who lead his magnificent band – but, by the late-1960s, had cut back on his workload. He had over 4,000 songwriting credits and some of these proved extremely lucrative. In recent decades he lead his own Dixieland jazz band, playing the music he had grown up learning from his father, a New Orleans homeboy to the end.

Bartholomew’s immense musical talent was matched by his self-confidence and discipline. He succeeded at a time of extreme racial segregation and brutally exploitative recording deals, yet never lost control of his publishing or the direction he wanted to take. A tall, proud man, he did it his way – RIP, Mr Big Beat.

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