Austin City Limits

We here at Austin City Limits were saddened to learn of the death of rock & roll pioneer Fats Domino on October 24 at the age of 89. The ivory-tickling New Orleans icon appeared in a hour-long, hits-packed 1987 episode of ACL.

Antoine “Fats” Domino was born in 1928 in the Big Easy to a French Creole family – Louisiana Creole French was his first language. He learned to play piano from his jazz musician brother-in-law, joining bandleader Billy Diamond’s group in 1947. (Diamond bestowed the nickname “Fats” on the young musician in tribute to Fats Waller.) Fats released “The Fat Man,” his first single, in 1949 – a million-selling song that pioneered rock & roll before the term even existed. Fats went on to score 37 top 40 singles, including such immortal classics as “Blue Monday,” “I’m Walkin’,” “Ain’t That a Shame,” “I Hear You Knockin’,” “Walkin’ to New Orleans” and his version of the Gene Autry/Louis Armstrong standard “Blueberry Hill,” his bestselling and highest-charting song. As with many of the original rockers, his chart career waned after the British Invasion, but he continued to record and tour into the 1980s. By the end of that decade, he decided that he would no longer leave his hometown, claiming he couldn’t find any food he liked on the road – not even induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame or an invitation to perform at the White House could change his mind. Like far too many others, he was forced to leave New Orleans after Katrina flooded his home, but he returned as soon as he could, remaining a fixture until Father Time did what Mother Nature could not.

Here is Fats doing “Blue Monday” on ACL in 1987.  

And “Blueberry Hill,” possibly his signature song in a catalog full of candidates, from the same show.

We here at Austin City Limits were saddened to learn of the death of Texan singer/songwriter Eric Taylor on Monday, March 9, after months of ill health. He was 70. 

Though born in Georgia, Taylor was a key figure in the Texas singer/songwriter scene of the early 1970s. Having stranded himself in Houston in 1970 on the way to California by running out of money, he integrated himself into the folk clubs, honing his craft in thrall to Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. In turn, he inspired the next generation, bridging the gap between the Clark/Van Zandt era and that of Robert Earl Keen and Lyle Lovett, on whom he had a particularly deep influence. 

After making his recording debut in 1976 on the Houston songwriters compilation Through the Dark Nightly, Taylor released his first album Shameless Love in 1981. It would be another fourteen years before his second, eponymous LP, released in 1995 on Austin label Watermelon Records. Seven more records followed, including 2001’s Scuffletown, which occasioned his first headlining appearance on Austin City Limits. His songs were covered by Lovett and Nanci Griffith, who called him “the William Faulkner of songwriting in our time.” 

“Taylor’s great gift was characters who he’d enliven with enough mythology to where the real and the fictional could be indistinguishable,” wrote Andrew Dansby in the Houston Chronicle. “The reality of a given name didn’t matter: the themes of searching and endurance mattered.”
Taylor first appeared on Austin City Limits as a guest on Lyle Lovett’s twenty-fifth season episode in 2000, in which the latter paid tribute to the Texas songwriters who inspired him. Here are Taylor and Lovett doing “Hemingway’s Shotgun.”