Red Sails In The Sunset

Red Sails in the Sunset — Fats Domino: History

By 1963, Fats Domino had been a major figure in American popular music for nearly a decade. His New Orleans-rooted piano boogie, his distinctive vocal style, and his extraordinary commercial productivity throughout the late 1950s had established him as one of the essential figures of early rock and roll. He had scored an enormous string of hits on Imperial Records, the Los Angeles-based independent that had been his label home since the late 1940s. When that relationship ended, he moved to ABC-Paramount, a major label that was actively pursuing rhythm and blues artists in the early 1960s. It was at ABC-Paramount that he recorded his version of "Red Sails in the Sunset," bringing his thoroughly distinctive musical personality to a song that predated his entire career by nearly three decades.

"Red Sails in the Sunset" was originally written in 1935, with music by Hugh Williams (a pseudonym for Wilhelm Grosz) and lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy. It was one of the most popular songs of the mid-1930s, recorded by numerous artists across the era's popular music landscape and becoming a standard that survived the decade of its origin to become part of the permanent repertoire of American popular song. By the time Fats Domino recorded it, the song had already been covered many times, which meant that his version needed to offer something genuinely distinctive to justify its existence in the marketplace.

Domino's distinctiveness was never in question. His piano playing, his vocal inflection, and the New Orleans rhythm section configurations that characterized his recordings were so personally identifiable that any material he touched emerged sounding specifically like him rather than like the song's previous interpreters. This was both his greatest commercial asset and his most important artistic quality: Fats Domino brought his listeners to the music rather than going to wherever the music was conventionally located.

The ABC-Paramount recording was released in 1963, and Domino's treatment gave the pre-war standard a rolling, New Orleans-inflected feel that was entirely at odds with the lush orchestrations that had characterized many of the song's most popular earlier versions. The rhythmic foundation was looser and more conversational than the precise, formally arranged approach of the swing-era recordings, and Domino's vocal approach was intimate rather than theatrical. The effect was to make a song with a romantic, nostalgic subject feel lived-in rather than performed.

The timing of Domino's ABC-Paramount recordings placed him in a commercial environment that was notably less favorable than the one he had navigated during his Imperial years. The early 1960s pop marketplace was being disrupted by the success of the twist and by the ongoing development of soul music, and the kind of New Orleans boogie that Domino had perfected was increasingly difficult to place on the Hot 100. His chart success at ABC-Paramount was real but less consistent than it had been at Imperial, where he had placed records on the chart with remarkable regularity throughout the late 1950s.

Within the broader context of standards recordings by rock and roll artists in the early 1960s, Domino's version of "Red Sails in the Sunset" was among the more successful examples. The genre of the rock artist recording a pre-war or early-pop standard was well-established by this point, driven partly by commercial calculation and partly by genuine affection for the material on the part of the artists involved. In Domino's case, the affection was credible; he had grown up in New Orleans absorbing the full range of American popular music and had a natural ease with material from outside the strict rock and roll repertoire.

Domino's version charted in the United Kingdom as well as in the United States, reflecting the genuine international following he had built during his years at Imperial. The British market had been receptive to American rhythm and blues and rock and roll acts during this period, and Domino's reputation there was strong enough to generate chart interest in his new recordings. This international dimension of his career is sometimes underemphasized in accounts that focus primarily on his American chart performance.

The recording stands in Domino's catalog as an illustration of his range as an interpreter of American popular music. He was not merely a rock and roll specialist but a musician whose New Orleans roots gave him access to a much wider tradition of American song, and "Red Sails in the Sunset" is one of several recordings that demonstrates this breadth. His ability to make the song sound entirely natural in his hands, to absorb it into his musical personality without distorting it beyond recognition, reflected the depth of his musical grounding.