Chuck Berry
'If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.' — John Lennon
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and colleagues ⏳🌊
- FamilyThemetta Berry
His wife, whom he married in 1948 and who stood by him for 68 years until his death; his final album, Chuck, was dedicated to her.
- Band memberJohnnie Johnson
The pianist who brought Berry into his trio in 1952 and shared his recordings and stages for decades.
- InfluenceMuddy Waters
The Chicago blues master Berry looked up to, who introduced him to Chess Records.
- ProducerLeonard Chess
Co-founder of Chess Records, who made the golden-era recordings, "Maybellene" among them.
- InfluenceJohn Lennon
The Beatle who called rock and roll's other name Chuck Berry; the two sang together on television in 1972.
- InfluenceKeith Richards
The Rolling Stones guitarist who grew up learning Berry's guitar; he served as music director for the 1986 tribute concert.
I. The boy from the Ville · 1926–1947
(The Ville) He was born in October 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. His full name was Charles Edward Anderson Berry, and he was the fourth of six children. His father, Henry, was a building contractor and a deacon of a Baptist church; his mother, Martha, was a qualified schoolteacher. The family's neighborhood, 'the Ville,' was where the Black middle class lived in a strictly segregated city. Berry later recalled that he grew up there hardly ever seeing a white person. (Church) Music came first from church and home. His parents sang in the church choir, and there was a piano in the house. At a talent show at Sumner High School he sang a Jay McShann blues to loud applause, and around that time he began learning guitar. Louis Jordan's jaunty story-songs heard on the radio, T-Bone Walker's electric guitar, Nat King Cole's crisp diction, and white country music all mingled together and widened his ear. (Reform school) In 1944, before finishing school, he drove to Kansas City with friends, robbed several stores, stole a car, and was arrested. Convicted of armed robbery, he was sent to the juvenile reformatory at Algoa, near Jefferson City, and was released only in October 1947, on his twenty-first birthday. Inside, he formed a four-man vocal group that even performed outside the facility, and he took up boxing. (Distrust) Those three years stayed with him for a long time. A deep-rooted distrust of law and authority, and a stubborn refusal to entrust his money or contracts to anyone, were traits his colleagues consistently described in later years. Biographers often trace their roots to this period.
II. Day jobs, night stages · 1948–1955
(Family) In October 1948, the year after his release, he married Themetta Suggs, known as Toddy. Their first daughter was born in 1950, and as head of the household he worked as a janitor at an auto plant, trained at a cosmetology school and worked as a hairdresser, and helped his father with carpentry. He also earned money taking photographs. By the early 1950s his life was steady enough that he could buy a small brick house. (Trio) Music began as a sideline. On the last day of 1952 he joined pianist Johnnie Johnson's trio as its guitarist, playing at the Cosmopolitan Club across the river in East St. Louis. With his commanding stage presence, Berry soon became the face of the band. Johnson, a man of few words who liked his drink, played piano on his records and onstage for decades afterward. (Hillbilly) At this club Berry played white country songs, hillbilly music as it was then called, for Black audiences. At first they laughed, but soon people were dancing, and more white customers came. His formula of laying country storytelling and clear diction over a blues rhythm, which would later carry music from the Black market over into the white pop market (crossover), was honed here. (Chicago) In May 1955 Berry went to Chicago, sought out a show by his idol Muddy Waters, and asked him where to go to make a record. Waters sent him to Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Chess paid less attention to the blues demos Berry had brought than to his reworking of the old country song “Ida Red.” Recorded on the 21st of that month, it became “Maybellene.”
A debut that reworked the country song “Ida Red” with Chicago blues players. The fusion of Black and white music he had tested in an East St. Louis club was put on record for the first time.
- The song is told as a breathless play-by-play of a Cadillac and a Ford chasing each other down the highway. Follow how each verse's rapid torrent of words alternates with the recurring chorus.
- Willie Dixon's double bass and Ebby Hardy's drums drive it on with a rhythm that hits hard on the second and fourth beats (backbeat). Above them, Jerome Green's maracas shimmer without pause.
- The guitar solo in the middle bursts out with a rough, scraping sound, unlike smooth jazz guitar. The recording is said to have been completed only after dozens of takes.
- Berry's diction is astonishingly clear. He said he wanted to sing so that both Black and white audiences could understand him, and this clarity became the signature of every song that followed.
III. The teenage storyteller · 1955–1959
(Maybellene) In the summer of 1955, “Maybellene” reached No. 1 on the rhythm and blues chart and No. 5 on the pop chart. But the songwriting credits also listed DJ Alan Freed and Russ Fratto. It was industry practice to split copyright shares in exchange for airplay. Having paid the price for not reading his contract carefully, Berry afterward became famous for demanding his fee in cash before a show. (Teenagers) Over the next four years came “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Days,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode.” Critics single out as his originality the way a Black family man past thirty vividly portrayed the everyday life of white teenagers: school bells, cars, jukeboxes, dates. He mixed in his own story, too. In his autobiography he said “Johnny B. Goode” was half about himself, and wrote that he changed the hero, originally a Black boy, into a country boy with radio in mind. (Tour) In the fall of 1957 he toured the country with Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and others on the 'Biggest Show of Stars' package tour. In the South, some venues would not let Black and white performers share the same stage. Holly later recorded Berry's “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Onstage Berry showed off the duckwalk, gliding forward with one knee bent while playing guitar; he recalled first doing it at a 1956 show in New York to hide a wrinkled suit. (Wealth) As the money came in, in 1957 he bought land in Wentzville, west of St. Louis, and built 'Berry Park,' a leisure complex with a swimming pool and a stage, and in 1958 he opened 'Club Bandstand,' a downtown nightclub that welcomed Black and white customers alike. Local resentment at a Black businessman opening a club in the heart of a white commercial district is said to have run high.
Berry said he got the idea from his sister Lucy, who monopolized the family piano practicing classical music. The song is like a manifesto, championing rhythm and blues against the authority of classical music.
- The song opens with the guitar alone in a short, unaccompanied solo. Already it uses the technique of sounding two strings at once like a chord (double stop), which sounds like a preview of the intro to “Johnny B. Goode” two years later.
- The narrator, in an excited tone, as if addressing the DJ and the listeners, urges them to play the new music. Listen for the playful contrast in which the names Beethoven and Tchaikovsky appear.
- Johnnie Johnson's piano fills the gaps left by the guitar with fine, trembling right-hand notes. The conversational give-and-take between guitar and piano is a hallmark of Chess recordings from this period.
- Compare it with the Beatles' 1963 recording, sung by George Harrison, and you can hear how faithfully the British band had absorbed Berry's rhythm.
The story of a country boy who makes it big with nothing but a guitar was Berry's own dream set to song. In 1977 the song left Earth aboard Voyager.
- The guitar intro in the first few seconds is one of the most famous short phrases (riff) in rock and roll. Played with the double-stop technique, pressing and strumming two strings together, it is known to have been borrowed from a phrase Carl Hogan, guitarist in Louis Jordan's band, used on a 1946 recording.
- The lyrics tell the hero's backstory like a third-person fairy tale, then turn into a cheer in the chorus. Listen to the narration shift between storyteller and cheering section.
- Session records often credit the piano not to Johnnie Johnson but to Lafayette Leake. The rhythm section was handled by Chess session players; notice the balance in which the piano steps back from the guitar to fill in the background.
- Compare it with the live footage in the 1986 concert film “Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll” and you can hear how roughly and freely Berry, now in his sixties, reworks the same intro.
It originally appeared as the B-side of “Back in the U.S.A.” Amid the racing teenage anthems, it shows Berry's gift for quiet, lonely storytelling.
- The narrator calmly asks a long-distance operator to connect him with someone. The heart of the song is its twist: it unfolds like a search for a lover until, only in the last verse, the person turns out to be his young daughter, separated from him by divorce.
- There is no chorus. Verses on the same melody follow one another, releasing information bit by bit, so on a first listen it is best not to look up the ending in advance.
- The guitar repeats a low melody in short, muffled notes, the strings lightly damped with the palm, while the drums follow very lightly. Set against the headlong rush of his other hits, the arrangement sounds restrained.
- The Beatles played it on BBC radio, and Johnny Rivers's 1964 version became a big hit in America.
IV. Prison and echoes from across the sea · 1959–1965
(Arrest) In December 1959 he was arrested under the so-called Mann Act, charged with transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes. He had brought a 14-year-old girl he met while touring the Southwest to St. Louis to work at his club, then fired her; the case came to light when she was arrested on another matter. The first trial, in 1960, was overturned by a higher court because of the judge's racist remarks and conduct, but a 1961 retrial again ended in a guilty verdict. Berry served time in federal prison from February 1962 to October 1963. (Cell) Even behind bars he kept writing. “Nadine,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “You Never Can Tell” and “Promised Land” were written around this time. He recalled asking the prison library for an atlas so he could get the place names right in “Promised Land,” which traces a journey across the American South. Many critics have noted that the songs of a man whose body was confined all sing of cars, roads and escape. (Invasion) While he was locked up, across the Atlantic his songs had become textbooks for a new generation. The Rolling Stones released his “Come On” as their first single in 1963, and the Beatles recorded “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Rock and Roll Music.” In America, the Beach Boys' “Surfin' U.S.A.” lifted the melody of “Sweet Little Sixteen” wholesale, and Berry eventually came to be credited as its songwriter. (Britain) After his release, Berry rode this wave back onto the charts in 1964, and that May he made his first British tour with Carl Perkins. Audiences were ecstatic, but colleagues remember him backstage as cold and thoroughly businesslike. That he trusted people even less after prison is an observation shared by many biographers.
One of the songs he wrote in prison, it was released after he got out. In a time when his body was confined, he chose instead to paint the simple happiness of a young newlywed couple.
- Piano and saxophone, not guitar, lead the song. The piano lays down a bouncy New Orleans–style accompaniment, and the saxophone answers briefly between verses.
- The narrator is an observer watching a neighbor's wedding. The chorus repeats an old saying the elders murmur as they shake their heads, and that calm, contented tone is the feeling of the whole song.
- What is unusual, if anything, is that Berry plays almost no guitar solo. The song is often cited as proof that he was a storyteller before he was a guitarist.
- It reached a new generation after it was used in the twist scene of the 1994 film “Pulp Fiction.”
He wrote the song with an atlas from the prison library spread open before him. A confined man imagined a journey clear across America, from Virginia to California.
- The melody is said to have been borrowed from the old country song “Wabash Cannonball.” Over the tune of a train song he laid a travelogue of switching from bus to train to plane.
- Real place names file past verse after verse. Critics have noted that the narrator's route through Southern cities overlaps with the path of the civil rights activists' 'Freedom Rides' of the time.
- Johnnie Johnson's piano serves as a ceaselessly advancing engine, its left hand rolling low notes in an accompaniment (boogie-woogie).
- Elvis Presley's 1974 recording is far faster and flashier. Compare it with the understated travelogue of the original.
V. A drifter with a guitar · 1966–1985
(The move) In 1966 he took a large advance and moved to Mercury Records, but did little more than re-record his old hits. When he returned to Chess in 1970, Leonard Chess had already died, in 1969. Concerts, more than new songs, became his livelihood. (The routine) In these years he settled into a distinctive way of touring. He boarded planes with no band, just a guitar, hired a local band in each town, and took the stage without rehearsal. He collected his fee in cash before the show. In 1973 in Maryland, the unknown band backing him included a young Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen recalled that Berry arrived just before showtime, never told them the set list, and said only that they would be playing Chuck Berry songs. (Comeback) A live recording of “My Ding-a-Ling” from a 1972 concert in Coventry, England, unexpectedly became his only Billboard No. 1. That same year he sang with John Lennon on television's “The Mike Douglas Show.” A publisher's lawsuit claiming that the Beatles' “Come Together” resembled Berry's “You Can't Catch Me” led to Lennon's 1975 covers album “Rock 'n' Roll,” and Elvis Presley recorded “Promised Land” in 1974. The golden record aboard Voyager, launched into space in 1977, carried “Johnny B. Goode.” (Taxes) In June 1979 he performed at the White House at the invitation of President Jimmy Carter. Yet a month later he pleaded guilty to income tax evasion, served four months in prison in Lompoc, California, and was ordered to do community service, including benefit concerts. His lifelong insistence on cash had, in the end, put him behind bars for a third time.
Recorded live at a concert in Coventry, England, in February 1972, it is his only Billboard No. 1. He reworked a naughty song that Dave Bartholomew had released in 1952.
- Pretending to tell of a toy a child was given, the song is a joke that hides a double meaning. In Britain a citizens' group even campaigned to have it banned from the airwaves.
- Listen to the audience rather than the song. The back-and-forth (call and response) in which Berry splits the crowd in two, has each side sing the chorus and tosses it back takes up half the recording.
- Listen to the way Berry talks. In the years when he took the stage with local bands and no rehearsal, he was more adept at working a crowd with his patter than with his guitar.
- Critics usually rank it far from his signature work, but the craft of a performer who could hold an audience more than thirty years his junior in the palm of his hand is heard best here.
VI. Evening at home · 1986–2017
(Induction) When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its first inductees in January 1986, his name stood at the head of the list, alongside Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Buddy Holly. He was inducted by Keith Richards, who used to recount with a laugh how Berry had punched him backstage in New York in 1981. (Documentary) That October, director Taylor Hackford filmed the concert held at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis for his 60th birthday and released it in 1987 as “Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll.” A celebrated moment in the film shows music director Richards and Berry facing off tensely in rehearsal over the guitar intro to “Carol.” That same year he published an autobiography he wrote himself, without a ghostwriter. (Ups and downs) His later years were not smooth either. In 1990 a search of his Wentzville home turned up marijuana; he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and received a suspended sentence. Around the same time came a string of civil suits alleging that he had installed a hidden camera in the women's restroom of a restaurant he ran, and the case ended in a settlement. In 2000 Johnnie Johnson sued for co-writing credit on a number of songs, but the suit was dismissed on the grounds that too much time had passed. (Blueberry) From 1996 to 2014 he played nearly every month in the basement venue of Blueberry Hill, a restaurant on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. In 2011 a statue of him went up on that street. (The end) On his 90th birthday in 2016 he announced a new album dedicated to Toddy, his wife of 68 years, and on March 18, 2017, he died at his Wentzville home. The album “Chuck” came out that June. His son Charles Berry Jr. and daughter Ingrid, who had played guitar and harmonica on his late-career stages, also took part in this final album.
His first new studio album in 38 years, and his last. It was dedicated to his wife Toddy, and his son, his daughter and longtime backing musicians all took part.
- The song chosen for video is “Big Boys.” A tale of a boy itching to be counted among the grown-ups, it revives the voice of 1950s teen songs intact at nearly ninety years of age.
- “Big Boys” features Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine on guitar and Nathaniel Rateliff on vocals. Listen for the moment in the middle solo when Morello's signature sharp sound layers over Berry's classic rhythm.
- The guitar tone sounds thicker and rounder than in the 1950s. But the double stops that strike two strings together and the short, clipped rhythm have not changed.
- Another song on the album, “Lady B. Goode,” is a companion piece to “Johnny B. Goode.” It is built like a reply to his own self of 60 years earlier.
Lesser-known stories
The spelling of “Johnny B. Goode” hides an address. The house where Berry was born stood on Goode Avenue in St. Louis, and he used the street's name instead of the usual spelling, Good. The song is also said to pay homage to the name of the pianist Johnnie Johnson, but Berry himself mostly described it as his own story. Overshadowed by the myth of a guitar boy's rise to success, the fact that the title comes from the address of his birthplace rarely gets a mention. Contrary to his image as a rock 'n' roll rebel, he was once a licensed hairdresser. The beauty school he attended belonged to the Poro College network founded by the Black businesswoman Annie Malone, an institution that was something of a point of pride for St. Louis's Black middle class at the time. Biographies carefully document his life in the early 1950s as an ordinary family man working as a factory janitor, a hairdresser and a carpenter, but popular accounts usually pass over it in a single line. Getting “Johnny B. Goode” onto Voyager's golden record met with opposition. According to “Murmurs of Earth,” the Sagan team's account, the folklorist Alan Lomax, who advised on the selection, objected that rock 'n' roll was adolescent, and Carl Sagan replied that there are a great many adolescents on the planet. In 1978 “Saturday Night Live” parodied the episode with a sketch in which the aliens' first reply was a request to send more Chuck Berry. The names of Alan Freed and Russ Fratto, listed among the writers of “Maybellene,” remained there long afterward. Berry is said to have regained sole songwriting credit for the song only in the 1980s, when the copyright came up for renewal. In effect, he had to share part of his debut's earnings with others for nearly 30 years.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Riff
(In rock) A short, catchy phrase repeated many times within a song. Separate from the vocal melody, it is usually played over and over by the guitar or piano as the face of the song. The first few seconds of “Johnny B. Goode” are a classic example. It's like a sports day where each class picks a short cheer and keeps chanting it, until you can tell which class it is from the cheer alone.
Double stop
(Meaning) On string instruments, a stop means pressing a string down with a finger to stop it. A double stop means pressing two strings at once. (In rock) A technique of pressing two guitar strings at the same time and strumming two notes together. It rings thicker and rougher than a single note, and it became the signature of Chuck Berry's guitar sound. It's like two friends shouting the same chant at the same moment at different pitches: it sounds fuller than one voice alone.
Backbeat
(Meaning) In English, the beat at the back. Of the four beats in a bar, it means the beats that follow rather than those in front. (In rock) A rhythm that stresses the second and fourth of four beats with hard hits on the drums. Here lies the biggest secret of how rock 'n' roll gets bodies moving. When you clap along to a song, clapping only on two and four of one-two-three-four suddenly makes it sound exciting — that clap is the backbeat.
Boogie-woogie
(In rock) A style of accompaniment in which the pianist's left hand rolls low notes in a steady pattern without pause. It began with Black American pianists of the 1920s–40s and became the foundation of rock 'n' roll piano. Like the endless clackety-clack of a train passing over the rail joints, the left hand keeps running at the same beat while the right hand plays freely above it.
Rhythm and blues
(Meaning) A term that joins rhythm and blues. In 1949 the American music magazine Billboard began using it in place of the outdated, discriminatory name it had given its chart of Black music. (In rock) Danceable music that Black American musicians of the 1940s–50s made by adding a strong beat, horns and electric guitar to the blues. Rock 'n' roll branched off from it. When a band at a school festival takes a quiet choral piece and plays it to an upbeat rhythm, the whole mood changes; the shift from blues to rhythm and blues was that kind of change.
Crossover
(Meaning) In English, to cross over. (In rock) When music made for one market or audience becomes popular with another as well. In the 1950s it meant rhythm and blues songs made for Black audiences climbing the white pop charts, and Chuck Berry widened that path considerably. It's like a game that was a fad only in our class spreading to the next class and other grades until the whole school is playing it. (Elsewhere) In cars, a crossover is a vehicle that blends the features of a sedan and an SUV; in basketball, it is a dribble that switches the ball from hand to hand to shake off a defender.
Call and response
(Literal meaning) It means to call and to respond. (In rock) One person sings a line and another singer, or the audience, sings back in answer. Carried over from African music and African American church music, it took root in the blues and rock and roll. It has exactly the same structure as a school retreat where the teacher shouts out a chant and everyone shouts back the set reply at the top of their lungs.
Duck walk
(Literal meaning) In English it means to walk like a duck. (In rock) A stage move made famous by Chuck Berry. Bending one knee deeply and stretching the other leg out in front, he glides across the stage while playing the guitar. Later guitarists, AC/DC's Angus Young above all, took it up in their own fashion. Picture the duck walk from gym class, then imagine crossing a stage in that crouch while playing the guitar, and you can guess how grueling a move it is.