Earl Palmer: The Drummer on Everything You've Ever Heard

The Drummer on Everything You've Ever Heard

If you've listened to music made in America between 1949 and 2000, there's a very good chance Earl Palmer played drums on it. The Tremé-born session drummer is arguably the most recorded musician in history, and yet most people have never heard his name. That's the life of a session player—you make the records that change the world, and somebody else gets the fame.

Palmer grew up in Tremé in a show business family and was performing by age five, tap dancing on the Black vaudeville circuit. That early training in rhythm and showmanship would serve him well, but it was his post-war music studies and his natural feel for the groove that turned him into something unprecedented.

In the late 1940s, Palmer became the go-to session drummer in New Orleans, working at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Recording Studio on North Ramsey Street. The records he made there didn't just launch careers—they launched genres. He played on Fats Domino's "The Fat Man," widely considered one of the first rock and roll records ever made. He played on Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti," "Long Tall Sally," and virtually every hit Richard had. He played on Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy." He played on records by Smiley Lewis, Guitar Slim, and dozens of others.

What Palmer brought to those records was the New Orleans beat—a syncopated, rolling groove rooted in second line rhythms and parade music that was fundamentally different from anything else in American popular music. When people talk about the backbeat that defines rock and roll, they're talking about what Earl Palmer played. He didn't just play on rock and roll records—he helped invent the way rock and roll drums sound.

In 1957, Palmer moved to Los Angeles and became part of the legendary Wrecking Crew, the group of session musicians who played on virtually every hit record coming out of Hollywood in the 1960s. The musicians union tracked him playing on 450 sessions in 1967 alone. He played on records by Frank Sinatra, Phil Spector's Wall of Sound productions, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, and hundreds more. He played on film scores and television themes. He was everywhere.

The remarkable thing about Palmer is that he could play anything. New Orleans R&B, rock and roll, jazz, pop, country, film scores—he adapted to every style while always bringing that fundamental New Orleans feel. Producers called him because he made every record sound better, and he did it without ego, without drama, just pure musicianship.

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally inducted him in 2000, it was an acknowledgment of something that musicians had known for decades: Earl Palmer was the foundation that an enormous amount of American popular music was built on. He was the beat beneath the songs you grew up singing, the groove under the records that changed your life. He came from Tremé, and he changed the sound of the world.