Today is the birthday of the great Antoine "Fats" Domino, who was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1928. Although Domino did not appear in Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015), he did appear in the Top 30 in 1956 with "I'm in Love Again" and the Top 40 in 1957 with "I'm Walkin'." He was also no stranger to the year-end Hot 100 charts, as in addition to the aforementioned tunes, his "Blueberry Hill" appeared at #41 in 1956 and #48 in 1957; "My Blue Heaven" appeared at #92 in 1956; "Blue Monday" at #50 and "Valley of Tears" at #87 in 1957; "I Want to Walk You Home" at #68 in 1959; "Walking to New Orleans" at #72 in 1960; and "Let the Four Winds Blow" at #82 in 1961. Additionally, Domino's "Ain't It a Shame" (which was covered by Pat Boone as "Ain't That a Shame" and, as such, made it to #9 on the year-end list for 1955) was listed on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004 (#431), along with "Blueberry Hill" (#81). Half of the tunes in this list were written or co-written by Domino; the others were included in the study because they represented him as a performer.

A lexical analysis of the 10 songs reveals the usual suspects in the Top Ten-ranking words, including you and I, and me and my, and other function words. However, the next ten words are more revealing:

Fig. 1: Words ranked 11th to 20th in dataset (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Variants of walk are obviously used a great deal in Fats' work, as suggested by the titles of his songs, but confirmed by walk appearing as the 11th-ranked term in the list and walking as the 13th-ranked term. In fact, walk and walking are used 33 times in 4 songs in the dataset. For comparison, in the full set of the 1951-2015 Top Ten lyrics, walk is ranked at #198 and walking at #467, while for the 1950s, walk appears at #423 and walking at #557. Domino is very likely alluding to his high use of walk variants in his songs, or at least to his 1957 hit "I'm Walking" or his 1959 hit "I Want to Walk You Home", when he begins his 1960 hit "Walking to New Orleans" with the line: "This time I'm walking to New Orleans."

Figure 1 also reveals that Fats uses ain't at a high rate in his songs. Ranked at number 20 in the dataset, the shibboleth appears in "Ain't It a Shame" and "Walking to New Orleans." In the full set of lyrics, however, ain't is the 83rd ranked word, and it is ranked 91st in the 1950s.

Ain't is not the only nonstandard linguistic feature used by Domino in the dataset. Others include a double negative ("Told me you didn't want me around no more") in "I'm in Love Again" and several examples of subject-verb nonconcord in various songs: here come in "Blue Monday"; hearts has been broken and Soft words has been spoken in "Valley of Tears"; and I wants to in "I Want to Walk You Home."

Although he has not left New Orleans for many years, Domino still performs and occasionally shows up in television shows and movies filmed in and about the Crescent City.

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