Blue Monday

Fats Domino earned his survivor’s badge well before the New Orleans flood that ravaged the 78-year-old rock legend’s longtime home. Blue Monday‘s last chapter is such a litany of dying former sidemen, you have to laugh when one survivor quips that his ex-boss ”killed two or three bands.” Yet Domino may be the least celebrated of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 10 original inductees, leading Rick Coleman to conclude his subject hasn’t gotten his due because he was a black man who wasn’t flamboyant or nuts. Domino seems almost offputtingly passive as a character, though not as a piano-pounder. But early-rock buffs will relish recountings of the storm of world-changing race music around the book’s calm, shy, simple center.