Reading: Blue Monday

I've finally gotten around to reading the Fats Domino book I bought at this year's Jazz Fest: Blue Monday by Rick Coleman. I'm enjoying it, it's an interesting book. Today Fats is looked on as a safe, almost comical singer in some regards. Coleman brings the reader back to the early days of the music that would later be called rock and roll and shows how important Fats was to that early development. Fats played a big role in bringing whites and blacks together in these early musical shows. And far from being a safe singer, at a lot of early Fats shows the audience was prone to riots. Coleman intersects the musical playing of Fats and other black R&B (and early Rock n Rollers) singers with the growing civil rights movements of the late fifties and early sixties and how important this music was to the movement.