When anyone in the music industry was looking for a perfect drummer, they called on Earl Cyril Palmer.
“If any single musician can be credited with defining rock and roll as a rhythmic idiom distinct from jump, R&B and all else that preceded it,” music critic and historian Robert Palmer said, “that musician is surely Earl Palmer.”
The list of artists who utilized Palmer’s drumming skills is long. It starts and ends with bandleader Dave Bartholomew. The eclectic group of artists in between include Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, Petula Clark, Neil Young and Waylon Jennings.
“I took pride in being able to do this, that, and the other,” Palmer said in 2003. “Like it or not, I took pride in playing it, and I tried to play it, all of it, like it was my favorite.”
Born in New Orleans in 1924, Palmer learned to keep time as a tap dancer on Bourbon Street. “Being a tap dancer, you’re drumming, syncopation wise,” he said. “I knew the tunes before I played any drums.”
After World War II, Palmer studied drums at the Grunewald School of Music. He was 22 when he joined Bartholomew’s band.
“Palmer’s early sessions included Bartholomew’s recordings and local talent,” such as Fats Domino, 64 Parishes states. “Perhaps Palmer’s most consequential New Orleans session happened in 1955,” when Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti.”
“The only reason I started playing what they came to call a rock and roll beat came from trying to match Richard’s right hand,” Palmer said.
Palmer, who died in 2008, moved to Los Angeles in 1957. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.
“When you called Earl Palmer into your sessions,” the Hall states, “you knew you were getting the finest grooves in New Orleans.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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