Dave Bartholomew, a trumpeter, composer and bandleader whose uncanny ability to spot and nurture promising performers, most notably Fats Domino, helped stamp New Orleans’ imprint on the developing genre of rock ‘n’ roll, died Sunday morning (June 23) at East Jefferson General Hospital, according to his son Ron. Mr. Bartholomew was 100.
“It’s virtually impossible to imagine the New Orleans musical canon without the impact of Dave Bartholomew,” Michael Hurtt wrote on www.ponderosastomp.com. “His devastating influence has charted the course of the city’s jazz, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, soul and funk sounds for well over 50 years.”
In addition to performing, writing songs and leading bands, Mr. Bartholomew worked behind the scenes at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio, on the fringe of the French Quarter. There, he would find singers and instrumentalists and then play musical matchmaker to bring them together in just the right combinations and produce dozens of recordings, starting in the late 1940s.
In addition to Domino, those artists included Smiley Lewis, Snooks Eaglin, Little Sonny Jones, Pee Wee Crayton, Shirley and Lee, Frankie Ford and Sugarboy Crawford.
“He genuinely loved music, and he genuinely loved being part of the birth of rock ‘n’ roll as an expression of New Orleans music,” said Gwen Thompkins, host of WWNO’s “Music Inside Out.”
“He loved not just having hits, but he loved music, and he loved to get the music right,” she said.
Mr. Bartholomew, who had served in the Army during World War II, “ran a tight ship in the studio,” said George Ingmire, a documentarian who has done oral histories of New Orleans musicians.
“There was no showing up late. There was no drinking,” Ingmire said. “You wouldn’t have the number of hits that Fats Domino and others who recorded at Cosimo Matassa’s studio were it not for that tight ship. There was an enthusiasm and a work ethic that went around. Dave set the tone.”
He was “enormously feisty – a very powerful man and a perfectionist out to show the world that he had the power to orchestrate the music and arrange for Fats Domino,” said Nick Spitzer, the host of the public-radio program “American Routes.” “He was a tough cat. You didn’t want to mess with that guy.”
Although Mr. Bartholomew had a reputation as a martinet, he had been around musicians long enough to allow for the possibility of spontaneous magic once people started playing, said Ingmire, who explained Mr. Bartholomew’s success by saying, “He was at the crossroads of industry and serendipity.”
Mr. Bartholomew’s most famous protégé was Domino, whom he had let sit in with his band when Domino was a teenage prodigy from the Lower 9th Ward.
In addition to Mr. Bartholomew’s other duties, he was a talent scout for Imperial Records. One fateful night, he invited Lew Chudd, the label’s owner, to hear Domino when the young man was playing with Billy Diamond’s band in a club on North Rampart Street.
After hearing Domino play “Junker Blues,” Chudd signed him to a contract.
The song, which was renamed “The Fat Man,” was, in 1949, the first record Domino worked on with Mr. Bartholomew.
That record marked a turning point in New Orleans’ music history because it mixed Domino’s faster, heavier rhythm with Mr. Bartholomew’s reliance on jump blues, said Rick Coleman, author of “Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Dawn of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
The result, he said, “was like two trains colliding. The two combined for a heavy rhythm that was the forerunner of the rock ‘n’ roll beat. Young people heard this music and had music to dance to, which was rare in those days.”
“The Fat Man” launched a 14-year partnership that was immensely productive, with dozens of hits such as “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday,” “I Hear You Knocking” and “Whole Lotta Lovin’.”
That period, however, was also fraught with tension because the two men had diametrically opposite personalities.
Mr. Bartholomew “wasn’t that big on Fats because he was just a chubby piano player going around in his overalls because he was a day laborer, a mechanic who worked in a mattress factory,” Coleman said. “He went to nightclubs in his overalls, which Dave didn’t approve of because people (in nightspots) dressed up.”
Mr. Bartholomew tried to burnish Domino’s music, too, by, for instance, imposing a structure on his songs by giving each a beginning, a middle and an end, Thompkins said.
“He was frustrated with Fats, who didn’t seem to care about that,” she said.
As Domino’s fame grew, Mr. Bartholomew “wanted you to know that he was the man who made Fats Domino possible,” said Spitzer, who also is a folklorist at Tulane University. “They were yin and yang: He was moving forward and being tough, while Fats was genteel and Creole.”
Their relationship was “a kind of marriage,” Thompkins said. “It was a tumultuous marriage because Bartholomew always felt superior to Domino as far as musical ability was concerned, but Fats had the hits.”
The two men “needed each other desperately – the sweet, honeyed voice of the man who could cross over to a white audience and a Svengali who ran the band and made sure everybody was ready,” Spitzer said. “They found each other, and it ended up in fabulous music for both of them.”
In a 2010 interview with Mr. Bartholomew and Domino that Eric Paulsen of WWL-TV set up and Keith Spera wrote about for The Times-Picayune, the two men discussed their informal way of making music.
“Actually, we never sat down to write anything,” Mr. Bartholomew said. “He and I just played. If we started a song and we got lost … I remember one time on 'I’m in Love Again,’ we went outside and somebody said, ‘Don’t let the dog bite you.’ So we come back and put that in the song.
“We always had an awful lot of rhythm in our world, plus the blues, and New Orleans being known for its second-line, we considered that, too. With that, and what we added to it, we were very lucky. It went over big.”
Mr. Bartholomew was born in Edgard on Christmas Eve in 1918. It was in the heart of sugarcane country; even after the family moved to New Orleans in 1933, Coleman said that Mr. Bartholomew returned occasionally to cut cane when he needed money.
“He knew what hard work was,” Coleman said, “and he knew he didn’t want to do it.”
Mr. Bartholomew’s father played bass. The youngster hung out at his father’s barber shop, where he fell in with musicians because they would meet there and go to gigs, Coleman said.
He learned to play the tuba and then moved to the trumpet. Coleman said the fledgling musician happened to catch the eye of Peter Davis, who had taught Louis Armstrong at the Colored Waifs Home and said he would be the young man’s mentor.
In addition to natural talent, Mr. Bartholomew “really had a drive from his really needy youth to be successful and make himself into somebody successful and make money,” Coleman said.
He played in bands led by Papa Celestin, Fats Pichon and Joe Robichaux. When Pichon broke up his band to be a solo pianist, Mr. Bartholomew led the remnants of that ensemble, Coleman said, and he played in national bands led by Ernie Fields and Jimmie Lunceford before he joined the Army in World War II.
Even though Mr. Bartholomew was in the service of his country, he didn’t let his musical instincts idle. He was a member of the 196th Army Ground Forces Band, and he put in his time developing his writing and arranging skills.
“He was learning how to be an arranger and a band leader,” Coleman said. “That was what his destiny was.”
When Mr. Bartholomew returned to civilian life in New Orleans, he assembled a band that played swing and jump blues, Coleman said. Its first gig was at the Dew Drop Inn.
He started recording at J&M in 1947 and became a close ally of Cosimo Matassa, who, Coleman said, invited Mr. Bartholomew in to do arrangements. Around this time, Mr. Bartholomew also met Chudd, of Imperial Records, who, Coleman said, asked him to find people whose talents merited recording.
His career as a talent scout had begun. It was an ideal job, Thompkins said, because, with his years of experience and his knowledge of the city and its musicians, Mr. Bartholomew knew where to go to find the best talent.
“I always prided myself on having the best musicians,” Mr. Bartholomew told Hurtt in an interview. “If I can’t have the best musicians, I’d rather not play.”
The recordings, often featuring Mr. Bartholomew’s band, “blended country and western chord changes with a driving backbeat, tripleting piano, rocking saxophones and deceptively simply guitar lines,” Hurtt wrote. “Solos, generally taken by either sax or guitar, were loaded with feeling and seemed programmed to snap the listener to attention.”
The result became known as “the New Orleans sound,” Hurtt wrote, and Mr. Bartholomew “liberally built upon it until it was ingrained in the city’s very soul.”
Mr. Bartholomew left Imperial in 1950 and moved on to other labels, including Decca, King and Specialty. He wrote and recorded “My Ding-a-Ling,” which became a hit for Chuck Berry, and he produced Lloyd Price’s recording of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” which Price had written, with Domino, uncredited, playing piano.
He also worked for Trumpet Records and Mercury Records, before establishing his own label, Broadmoor Records, in 1967. It went under a year later when its distributor, Dover Records, went out of business.
In the 1970s, after three decades of moving beyond traditional jazz, Mr. Bartholomew returned to that genre when he led a traditional jazz band, and he joined Domino on his international tours.
The two men were honored in 2010 by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Music Masters series. It was the first time the series had honored a team.
Mr. Bartholomew is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Survivors include his wife, Rhea Bartholomew; five sons, Dave Jr., Don, Ron and Darrell Bartholomew, and Alvin LeBeau, all of New Orleans; three daughters, Deborah Hubbard and Diane Wilson, both of New Orleans; and Jacqueline Temple of Atlanta; and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Charbonnet-Labat-Galpion Funeral Home will be in charge of the funeral arrangements, which are incomplete.