Chuck Berry

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Chuck Berry was buried with a cherry-red Gibson ES-355 guitar bolted to the inside lid of his coffin. That image captures something essential about the man: even in death, the instrument came with him. Born on the 18th of October 1926, in St. Louis, Missouri, Charles Edward Anderson Berry would spend nine decades on earth turning rhythm and blues into something the world had never heard before. He called it, and the world came to call it, rock and roll.

  By the time Berry died on the 18th of March 2017, John Lennon had said that if you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.' Bob Dylan had called him 'the Shakespeare of rock and roll.' Bruce Springsteen had called him 'rock's greatest practitioner, guitarist, and the greatest pure rock and roll writer who ever lived.' And yet Berry himself, standing before an eight-foot statue of himself erected in St. Louis in 2011, said simply: 'I don't deserve it.'

  How does a man become the sonic architect of an entire art form? What got him there, and what nearly derailed him more than once? The answers live in the Ville neighborhood of north St. Louis, in a Chess Records studio on a May afternoon in 1955, in a federal prison cell, and on countless stages where a middle-aged man dropped into a crouch and walked like a duck.

• 2. The Ville and Early Trouble

  ›

  Henry William Berry was a contractor and Baptist church deacon; his wife Martha was a certified public school principal. Their youngest child, Charles, grew up in the Ville, a north St. Louis neighborhood where many middle-class Black families lived. Music interested him from an early age, and he gave his first public performance in 1941, still a student at Sumner High School.

  Three years later, also while still a student at Sumner, he robbed three shops in Kansas City, Missouri, then stole a car at gunpoint. His own account, written in his autobiography, notes the pistol was non-functional. The courts did not consider that a mitigating circumstance. He was convicted and sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men in Jefferson City, Missouri, which is now known as the Algoa Correctional Center. Inside, he formed a singing quartet and took up boxing; the singing group eventually performed outside the detention facility. Berry walked out on his 21st birthday in 1947.

  The years that followed looked, on the surface, entirely ordinary. He married Themetta Suggs on the 28th of October 1948. Their daughter Darlin Ingrid Berry was born on the 3rd of October 1950. He worked at two automobile assembly plants and as a janitor. He trained at the Poro College of Cosmetology, founded by Annie Turnbo Malone. By 1950 he had saved enough to buy a small three-room brick cottage on Whittier Street, which today is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Chuck Berry House. Nothing about those years suggested what was coming.

• 3. The Sound He Built

  ›

  T-Bone Walker gave Berry the grammar of what would become his style. Berry borrowed guitar riffs and showmanship techniques from the blues musician, then layered in lessons from jazz guitarist Ira Harris, a friend who helped shape the technical foundation of his playing. By early 1953, Berry was performing regularly with pianist Johnnie Johnson's trio, a partnership that would last for decades and that later produced a bitter legal dispute.

  What made Berry unusual was his refusal to stay in one lane. His band played blues, ballads, and country, and Berry noticed something happening when he played the country material for his predominantly Black audiences. He wrote about it directly: 'Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo? After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it.' Affluent white listeners also started coming in. Berry had found the seam between genres and was widening it.

  His guitar approach was distinctive without being conventionally virtuosic. He incorporated electronic effects to mimic bottleneck blues guitarists and drew on players including Carl Hogan and T-Bone Walker. The result was a clear, exciting sound that later guitarists would repeatedly name as the starting point for their own development. Joe Perry would later compare Berry's songwriting economy to Ernest Hemingway: precise, short sentences, a complete picture in a small space. Ted Nugent put it more bluntly: 'If you don't know every Chuck Berry lick, you can't play rock guitar.'

• 4. Chess, Maybellene, and the Hit Years

  ›

  In May 1955, Berry traveled to Chicago. He met Muddy Waters, who told him to contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Berry expected Chess to be interested in his blues material. Chess was more interested in Berry's take on a country tune called 'Ida Red.' On the 21st of May 1955, Berry recorded an adaptation of that song, retitled 'Maybellene,' with Johnnie Johnson on piano, Jerome Green from Bo Diddley's band on maracas, Ebby Hardy on drums, and Willie Dixon on bass.

  The record sold over a million copies. It reached number one on Billboard magazine's rhythm and blues chart and number five on its Best Sellers in Stores chart for the 10th of September 1955. Berry said: 'It came out at the right time when Afro-American music was spilling over into the mainstream pop.' What he did not say, at least not immediately, was that when he first saw the record, he was surprised to find two other individuals listed as co-writers, including DJ Alan Freed. That entitled them to royalties. Berry fought for and eventually regained full writing credit.

  The hits that followed redrew the map of popular music. 'Roll Over Beethoven' reached number 29 on Billboard's Top 100 in late June 1956. From 1957 to 1959, Berry scored over a dozen chart singles, including the Top 10 hits 'School Days,' 'Rock and Roll Music,' 'Sweet Little Sixteen,' and 'Johnny B. Goode.' He appeared in Rock Rock Rock in 1956 and Go, Johnny, Go! in 1959. His performance of 'Sweet Little Sixteen' at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival was captured in the film Jazz on a Summer's Day. He toured with the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and others in Alan Freed's 'Biggest Show of Stars for 1957.' Carl Perkins, who became a friend on the road, said: 'I knew when I first heard Chuck that he'd been affected by country music. I respected his writing; his records were very, very great.'

• 5. Prison, British Invasion, and Return

  ›

  In December 1959, Berry was arrested under the Mann Act. He had transported a 14-year-old Apache waitress named Janice Escalante across state lines to work at his St. Louis nightclub, Berry's Club Bandstand. After a two-week trial in March 1960, he was convicted, fined $5,000, and sentenced to five years. He appealed on grounds that the judge's comments had been racist and prejudiced the jury. The appeal succeeded, but a second trial in 1961 produced another conviction and a three-year sentence. Berry served one and one-half years, from February 1962 to October 1963.

  He came out to find that British bands had kept his name alive. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had both covered his songs. The Beach Boys had a hit in 1963 with 'Surfin' U.S.A.,' which used the melody of Berry's 'Sweet Little Sixteen.' Berry returned to the charts in 1964 and 1965 with eight singles, three of which reached the Top 20 of the Billboard 100: 'No Particular Place to Go,' 'You Never Can Tell,' and 'Nadine.'

  For Mercury Records between 1966 and 1969, he released five albums, including the live album Live at Fillmore Auditorium, recorded entirely onstage with the Steve Miller Band as his backing group. His touring style, however, was developing a difficult reputation. He used unrehearsed local bands, carried a strict nonnegotiable contract, and his behavior on a January 1965 UK tour was described as erratic and moody. In 1972, a live recording of 'My Ding-a-Ling,' a novelty song he had recorded in a different version on his 1968 album From St. Louie to Frisco, became his only number-one single. A follow-up live recording, 'Reelin' and Rockin',' was his last Top 40 hit in both the US and UK.

• 6. Solo on the Road

  ›

  For much of the 1970s, Berry toured carrying only his Gibson guitar, confident he could hire a band wherever he landed that already knew his songs. The approach worked logistically and failed artistically. AllMusic characterized his live performances in this period as 'increasingly erratic,' with terrible backup bands and sloppy, out-of-tune performances that damaged his reputation with younger fans and older ones alike.

  Among the musicians who backed Berry during these years were Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller, each still early in his career. Springsteen later recalled in the documentary film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll that Berry gave the band no set list and simply expected them to follow his lead after each guitar intro. Berry did not speak to the band after the show. Springsteen backed Berry again when Berry appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert in 1995.

  On the 1st of June 1979, at the request of President Jimmy Carter, Berry performed at the White House. That same year, he pleaded guilty to evading nearly $110,000 in federal income tax owed on his 1973 joint earnings of $374,982. He was sentenced to 120 days in prison. It was his third incarceration, and it arrived in the same year he last released a studio album for nearly four decades, Rockit for Atco Records. Berry's 1979 closed like a parenthesis around a decade of complicated contradictions.

• 7. Legacy and the Final Album

  ›

  In 1986, Berry was among the first musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The citation said he had 'laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance.' Taylor Hackford made a documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, of a sixtieth birthday celebration concert organized by Keith Richards, with Eric Clapton, Etta James, Julian Lennon, Robert Cray, and Linda Ronstadt all appearing.

  Berry continued playing one Wednesday each month at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and bar in St. Louis's Delmar Loop neighborhood, from 1996 to 2014. On his 90th birthday, he announced his first new studio album since 1979, titled Chuck, dedicated to his wife Toddy and including his children Charles Berry Jr. and Ingrid on guitar and harmonica. The album was released in 2017, the year he died.

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll includes three of Berry's: 'Johnny B. Goode,' 'Maybellene,' and 'Rock and Roll Music.' In December 2004, six of his songs appeared in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, with 'Johnny B. Goode' at number 7. Rolling Stone ranked him fifth on its 2004 and 2011 lists of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and second greatest guitarist of all time in 2023. Journalist Chuck Klosterman argued that in 300 years Berry will still be remembered as the rock musician who most closely captured the essence of rock and roll.

  Of 'Johnny B. Goode' specifically, something must be said: it is the only rock-and-roll song included on the Voyager Golden Record, launched into interstellar space in 1977. And in 2020, the International Astronomical Union named a small crater on Mercury after Berry. The duck walk that began when a child stooped under a table to retrieve a ball has now, in a sense, traveled farther than any performer in history.