Other seemingly very simple Domino songs hit listeners in powerful ways for very different reasons. “Goin’ Home,” a song that Fats wrote about his and he band members’ homesickness for New Orleans, became his first rhythm & blues No. 1 hit from 1952. The booming refrain-“Goin’ home tomorrow! Can’t stand your evil ways!”-was ostensibly about a romantic breakup, but it hit home with blacks who had migrated North (or West) from the South, as well as troops who were displaced from their homes due to the Korean War; more generally, it could be taken as an indictment of segregation, a system that African-Americans everywhere considered “evil.” The song was extremely influential, setting the musical and thematic pattern for No. 1 r&b hits by Guitar Slim (“The Things That I Used to Do”), Faye Adams (“Shake a Hand”) and Wilbert Harrison (“Kansas City,” a song that Leiber & Stoller originally wrote for Little Willie Littlefield as “K.C. Lovin'” in 1952). R&b legends Professor Longhair, Clifton Chenier, Little Richard (with Jimi Hendrix), Roscoe Gordon, James Brown, Percy Sledge and Dr. John would all record “Goin’ Home.”
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Other Domino songs were just conversational: “Yes, it’s me/and I’m in love again…/I want to walk you home,” and “Hello, Josephine/how do you do?” “Simple things, you know,” recalls Fats. “I used to write songs mostly from things you hear people say all the time. I try to tell a story and keep a good melody so people can understand-and a good beat [so] they could dance. Sometimes they come easy and sometimes it may take two months…now sometimes I can be just sitting around not thinking about nothing, and a boy might come in with a guitar. I might be on stage and the band be playin’, be jammin’, and I can just jam with ‘em and I get an idea for a song.
“Like I say, I always did write a story. I used to get my melody first, then later I’d get the words. Sometimes Dave used to go in the studio and he’d say, ‘Well, you come in here. I’m gonna make some tracks for you. And just do the rest the way you want.’ So that’s the way we did a lot of ‘em. And by the time I got there, Dave would have the music and just give it to me. I’d ask, ‘You have any words?’ He said, ‘Well, if you need some call me.’ So I just got my melody to fit the song. He knew what kind of changes I make in my music-something simple and catchy.”
“My Girl Josephine,” also known as “Hello Josephine,” was an example of a song on which Dave and Fats truly collaborated 50/50. “I remember he made a track for ‘Josephine’ and gave it to me,” says Fats. “And the next day I came up and said, ‘I got something.’ So I wrote that overnight. He mostly put on the arrangement, the music, but I mean, I wrote most of the things-a lot of things I wrote by myself. But that’s the reason we worked together, you know? ‘I’m Walkin”…I had that. I played it for Lew Chudd before I played it for Dave, I think. But Dave, everything I did, he know what to do with it. He’s good.”
Could “Fats read sheet music?