"I'm Walkin'" (Fats Domino)

I remember I was in kindergarten, and one of the first grade teachers had his students put on this little show for the fall PTA meeting called something like "Flashback to the 50s."  Actually, the whole school got into it: girls wore poodle skirts and bobby socks, and the boys had their hair greased back.  Well, most of the boys anyway.  My hair was too short to grease back.  So I went with the "Richie Cunningham" look: a plaid shirt, cuffed jeans, and a letter sweater (which my mom somehow crafted from an old pair of my pajamas).
Anyway, it was a great little show.  The teacher had his students singing and doing choreography to stuff like Danny & The Juniors' "At the Hop" and Bill Haley's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll."  It also was the first time I ever heard Antoine "Fats" Domino's "I'm Walkin'," and I couldn't get enough.  I think I walked around for a solid month, singing the first few lines (I'm walkin' / yes, indeed / I'm talkin'), because that's all I knew.  Drove my parents nuts.
Sidebar: I ended up having that same teacher the following year for first grade.  But, to my disappointment, we didn't get to do a show for the PTA; our new principal didn't really see the point in "50s Day," so she shut it down.  Oh, and the teacher turned out to be a lunatic, too.  Exhibit A: dude had very expensive, collectors' edition teddy bears, lining the walls of his classroom.  I made the mistake one day of giving one a hug named "Humphrey Beargart," which was dressed in a mini fedora and tan raincoat, and ended up on the receiving end of the biggest conniption fits I've ever witnessed from a grown man.  (I mean, you put a bunch of six-year-olds in a small room, lined with plush toys.  Do you really think they're going to give two poops and Popsicle that "Scarlett O'Beara" recently fetched $900 at auction?)
But, I digress.
I still love the song "I'm Walkin'" (1957) because it's two minutes of pure joy.
The New Orleans native's warm, ebullient delivery and simmering boogie-woogie piano reach right through the speakers and coax you out of any kind of funk you're in.  And that backbeat and heavy bassline (and it's no coincidence that it's a walking bassline) are steeped in the Crescent City second-line tradition, where straight 4/4 time always gets subdivided into funky polyrhythms.  It is music designed to make you move, and you can sense the music is coming right from the man's very soul.
Actually, I think this quote from around 1960 (later reprinted in Rolling Stone) sums it up pretty well: "I don't know what all the trouble is about us being a bad influence on teenagers.  I'm just playing the same music I played all my life."