Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry is perhaps the defining musician of the early rock & roll era, the one figure responsible for the music's sound, style, and sensibility that created the blueprint for the generations that followed. A guitarist who wanted to play like T-Bone Walker and croon like Nat King Cole, Berry married these two styles to a swinging beat that spliced jump blues with juke joint R&B and hillbilly boogie -- a blend that arrived nearly fully realized with his 1955 debut single "Maybellene," a record that topped the R&B charts and crashed into the pop Top Ten. Berry quickly followed "Maybellene" with a series of fleet-fingered, quick-witted singles like "Roll Over Beethoven," "School Day," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode" that constitute one of the richest and deepest American songbooks of the 20th century, a collection of tunes that captures the exuberance of post-war popular culture, a period filled with automobiles, teenagers, and rock & roll music. It was also a period of great racial strife, something Berry alluded to in his work -- witness the Black pride of "Brown Eyed Handsome Man." Berry's prison sentence for violating the Mann Act coincided with a cooling of rock & roll's commercial fortunes in the early 1960s. When he was released, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had revived rock & roll, an opening Berry seized with a series of terrific hit singles: "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell," and "Nadine." During the late '60s, Berry became the only one of his rock & roll peers to actively court a younger audience of hippies, a move that eventually paid off in 1972 when the ribald "My Ding-A-Ling" gave him his only number one hit. Berry effectively retired from active duty after 1979's Rockit, but he continued to play regular gigs with pickup bands and experienced the occasional revival, such as Taylor Hackford's 1987 celebratory concert film and documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll. During his later years, Berry retired to his hometown of St. Louis, playing regular gigs at Blueberry Hill until the late 2010s. Upon his 90th birthday in 2016, Berry announced the release of his first album in decades but he would not live to see the release of Chuck in 2017; he passed on March 18, 2017.

He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St. Louis in 1926. A bright pupil, he developed a love for poetry and hard blues early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal rendition of Jay McShann's big-band number "Confessin' the Blues." With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed from a four-string tenor guitar to an official six-string model and was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in everywhere he could. He quickly found out that Black audiences liked a wide variety of music and set himself the task of being able to reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really liked -- besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes -- was the sight and sound of a Black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's showman-like flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit. In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo, and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio the top attraction in the Black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm their only real competition.

But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters, who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking for a hillbilly tune on it named "Ida Red" and quickly scheduled a recording for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to "Maybellene" and rock & roll history was made. Although the record only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Finally, here was a Black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and was no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been given part of the writers' credits by Chess in return for his spins and plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount Theaters (playing to predominately white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later, he also made sure that Berry appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go, Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a year's time, Berry had gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making $15.00 a night to an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll.

The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every one of them about to become a classic of the genre: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "You Can't Catch Me," "School Day," "Carol," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Johnny B. Goode," and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, "Rock and Roll Music." Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St. Louis-area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a racially mixed nightspot called The Club Bandstand in 1958 to the consternation of uptight locals. These were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the nicest house in the Black section of town. Berry was smart, with plenty of business savvy, and was already making plans to open an amusement park in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to federal prison for two years as a result.

He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again. Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's style, with the Stones' early albums sounding like a Berry song list. Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ("Nadine," "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell"), toured Britain in triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964.

Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain, and when the cries of "yeah-yeah-yeah" were replaced with peace signs, Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit. After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the salacious nursery rhyme "My Ding-A-Ling," yielding Berry his first official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in-demand as ever, working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was thrown his way. But once again, trouble with the law reared its ugly head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax evasion. Upon his release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed biopic American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his reputation with young and old fans alike. In 1987, he published his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, which included live footage from a 60th birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns.

For the next three decades, Berry devoted himself to the oldies circuit, regularly appearing at the Blueberry Hill bar in his hometown of St. Louis and sometimes embarking on tours of the U.S. or Europe. In several interviews he promised the existence of a new record, but nothing was made official until he announced the 2017 release of Chuck on his 90th birthday. Berry didn't live to see its release: he died at his home on March 18, 2017. Chuck saw the light of day in June 2017; it peaked at 49 in the U.S. and number nine in the U.K. Live from Blueberry Hill, a collection of performances Berry gave over the years at his regular gig at the St. Louis bar, appeared in December 2021.

For all of his off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure long after his private escapades have faded from memory. When it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, "If you were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'." ~ Cub Koda