Domino’s song with the deepest roots may have been the raucous “Hey! La Bas Boogie.” “Hey La Bas,” sung by the mixed-race Creoles of New Orleans at Mardi Gras, became a jazz and Cajun standard. The original chorus of “Hey La Bas” is usually translated as “Hey over there, my dear cousin” (‘mon chere cousin’) and had verses about the voracious appetites of the Creoles, which (though the verses certainly fit him) Domino didn’t use. Though they took co-writing credit on the song, Domino and Bartholomew had different ideas about what the song meant.
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“That was a thing that everybody used to do around here,” says Fats. “‘Hey over there, bring my car!’ That’s what that means.” “It’s actually just broken French Creole,” states Dave. “‘Hey la bas’-‘Hey, over there. How you doing over there?'” As New Orleans jazz great Danny Barker recalled, the phrase was a greeting which was used for signifying. And-as made clear in the song-in the old African tribal call-and-response, the band sings “Hey La Bas!” and the audience shouts it back.
Both signifying and call-and-response were both African cultural remnants, but something far more potent may have survived in the phrase “hey la bas.” One of the primary deities of Dahomean and Voodoun culture was Legba (also pronounced “la BAH”), known in New Orleans as “Papa La Bas.” Thus, both saying and song may reflect a fascinating African survival, as preeminent African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. relates in The Signifying Monkey: Called Papa Legba as his Haitian honorific and invoked through the phrase “eh la-bas” in New Orleans jazz recordings…Pa Pa La Bas is the Afro-American trickster figure from black sacred tradition. His surname, of course, is French for “down” or “over there,” and his presence unites “over there” (Africa) with “right here.”
“Hey La Bas” was perhaps a dim reference-like “John the Conqueror Root,” “mojo” or “hoodoo”-to largely forgotten African religious practices. Slanderously identified with the “Devil,” Legba (or Papa La Bas) was, instead, the god of the crossroads, who bestowed musical powers there (as documented by a 1920s interview with a New Orleans conjurer). Drums were sacred to him, and he alone communicated universally. Perhaps most importantly, Legba, like Bartholomew’s signifying “Monkey” and the boll weevil in Domino’s “Bo Weevil,” was also the trickster-an African cultural survival, who, like music, had helped blacks psychically survive their terrible plight since slavery days.
The cultural parallels to Domino are remarkable, as Fats once stated, “The most important thing about my music is the beat.” He indeed communicated universally, becoming the best-selling rocker after Elvis Presley. Throughout his career he was at the crossroads-between deeply rooted African-American music and American popular song. And he was also a trickster, as the white powers-that-be to this day have dismissed him as harmless, though he was perhaps the most powerful force in bringing the heavily rhythmic African-American sound-and its all-important accompanying physical release-into the world’s culture.
You could likewise dismiss Domino’s lyrics-like much subject matter in early rock ‘n’ roll-as simplistic, but again, the cultural context is crucial. “The Fat Man” and “Hey La Bas! Boogie” both feature nonsensical words prominently. But just as Louis Armstrong had started scatting in his teenage street corner group, Domino’s wordless wails in several hits in the early 1950s (including “Please Don’t Leave Me,” “Rose Mary,” “You Done Me Wrong” and the suicidal swansong “Going to the River”) laid the groundwork for the subversively nonsensical syllables of doo-wop. This was a breakthrough genre that combined rhythm, melody and passion without saying a (real) word, as in Domino’s mouth harp chorus in “The Fat Man.”
“The thing that sounds like a harmonica,” remarks Fats, “I’m doin’ with my mouth-‘wah wah wah.'” After Domino’s tonsillectomy in 1954, a muted trumpet thereafter delivered the high-pitched wails in concert.
Could “Fats read sheet music?