26 Facts About Fats Waller

Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller was an American jazz pianist, organist, composer, and singer.

Fats Waller started playing the piano when he was six and began playing the organ at his father's church four years later.

Fats Waller's mother instructed him in his youth, and he attended other music lessons, paying for them by working in a grocery store.

Fats Waller attended DeWitt Clinton High School for one semester, but left school at 15 to work as an organist at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem, where he earned $32 a week.

Fats Waller was the prize pupil and later the friend and colleague of the stride pianist James P Johnson.

Fats Waller studied composition at the Juilliard School with Carl Bohm and Leopold Godowsky.

Fats Waller's mother died on November 10,1920, from a stroke due to diabetes.

Fats Waller's first published composition, "Squeeze Me", was published in 1924.

Fats Waller is believed to have composed many novelty tunes in the 1920s and 1930s and sold them for small sums, attributed to another composer and lyricist.

Fats Waller noted that early handwritten manuscripts in the Dana Library Institute of Jazz Studies of "Spreadin' Rhythm Around" are in Waller's hand.

Maurice Fats Waller wrote that his father objected to hearing "On the Sunny Side of the Street" on the radio.

Fats Waller played with Nathaniel Shilkret, Gene Austin, Erskine Tate, Fletcher Henderson, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, and Adelaide Hall.

Fats Waller was ordered inside the building and found a party taking place.

Fats Waller appeared in several feature films and short subject films, most notably Stormy Weather in 1943, which was released July 21, just months before his death.

Fats Waller influenced many pre-bebop jazz pianists; Count Basie and Erroll Garner both revived his hit songs.

Between 1926 and the end of 1927, Fats Waller recorded a series of pipe organ solo records.

Today's audiences can see and hear Fats Waller performing his own works in Soundies musical films.

Broadway producer Richard Kollmar's hiring of Fats Waller to create the 1943 musical Early to Bed was recalled in a 2016 essay about Fats Waller by John McWhorter.

Fats Waller was, after all, as much a comedian as a musician.

In 1920, Fats Waller married Edith Hatch, with whom he had a son, Thomas Fats Waller Jr.

Together, they had a son, Maurice Thomas Fats Waller, born on September 10,1927.

In 1938, Fats Waller was one of the first African Americans to purchase a home in the Addisleigh Park section of St Albans, Queens, a New York City community with racially restrictive covenants.

Fats Waller was returning to New York City from Los Angeles, after the smash success of Stormy Weather, and a successful engagement at the Zanzibar Room in Santa Monica, California, during which he had fallen ill.

Fats Waller tipped him handsomely and then hired him to be his relief pianist during his own performances.

Fats Waller recorded for Victor, so Decca Records hired singer-pianist Bob Howard for recordings aimed at Fats Waller's audience, and Columbia Records followed suit with Putney Dandridge.

Fats Waller has been with me from the first, and he'll be with me as long as I live.