Chuck Berry

There was certainly rock and roll before Chuck Berry. There was even rock and roll guitar before Chuck Berry. But no other figure so perfectly embodies for good or ill what rock and roll is about. The mystic Johnny B. Goode and more believable brown-eyed handsome man - one a talented naif, the other an urbane seducer - are just two of the Berry personas to have become archetypal figures in the history of rock. There's an element of autobiography in both of them.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born on Goode Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri on 18 October 1926. He entered the profession relatively late; he was almost 26 before he gave his first paid performance, and didn't record until three years later. Part of the delay might be due to the three and a quarter years he spent in a reformatory for car theft. His career in petty crime behind him, Berry settled down at the age of 21 to blue-collar labour, marriage and raising a family.
But he didn't stay settled for long and soon earned a minor reputation through singing and playing in local clubs. His onstage antics included scattering anomalous country songs among the Muddy Waters and Nat King Cole material. The next step was to interest a record company which for Berry, in mid-fifties US, could only mean Chicago-based Chess Records.

The label was home to Berry's idol Muddy Waters, and owner Leonard Chess was partial towards talented musicians who knew nothing about the record business.
Berry hastly worked up four songs for an audition tape. One of them "Ida May", was in the joking hillbilly style that had amused his club audiences. Leonard Chess picked it for Berry's first single, but asked him to retitle it. Berry obliged with "Maybelline" which, when released in the summer of 1955, started Berry's career with a vengeance.

It's a hard to hear its mock-country origins in the recording's pounding drums and over-amplified guitar as it is to hear either of Berry's professed influences, Cole and Waters, in the souped-up vocal delivery and teenage subject matter (a drag race). One of the more raucous sounds then heard on radio, "Maybelline" was the first of Berry's seven singles to make the Top 10 of the US pop charts. It also gave Berry a crash course in business practise when he discovered that other people, one of them powerful New York DJ Alan Freed, had been claiming shares of his songwriting credits and consequently royalties. Berry's name was kept in the public eye over the next five years through tours and a string of singles. From the end of 1957 to the spring of 1958 he had three successive huge hits; "Rock and roll music", "Sweet little sixteen" and "Johnny B. Goode". But even Berry's lesser hits; "Roll over Beethoven", "Carol" and "Almost grown", would end up as classics, thanks to his finely honed craftmanship.

Berry quickly gave up hope of following in Nat King Cole's footsteps. Working on a limited musical canvas, he found innummerable variations of his uptempo boogie forms and clarioncall guitar intros. The carefully enunciated lyrics established him as a poet laureate of adolescence during the late Fifties, the Eisenhower era. Berry had the detachment of age (he was a generation older than his fans) and a facility of a born wordsmith: his sketches of teenage life ("School day") and romance ("Little Queenie") never sounded condescending; his narrative drive ("You can't catch me") was a propulsive as his rhythm. The audience always came first, but Berry was too talented not to please himself while pleasing others.

Success brought fame, fortune and the increasing attention of legal authorities. Berry was arrested twice within 20 months on "white slavery" charges; his inter-racial womanizing did not go unchallenged. The government got their second case to stick, and in February 1962 Berry began a 20-month prison sentence. The jail sentence didn't dam Berry's creative flow; while in prison he penned classics like "Promised land", "You never can tell" and the apt "No particular place to go". However when he emerged from jail in 1964 it was to a changed pop-music scene. The Beach Boys' first Top 10 hit was Berry's "Sweet little sixteen" with new lyrics, rechristened "Surfin USA" and credited to Brain Wilson (Berry was later listed as composer). Meanwhile in the UK the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, among many others, used Berry's songs as a starting point for their own careers.
Berry himself, although on parole, enjoyed a reasonable 1964, distinguished by more hit singles and his first tours of the UK and France. However, in the second part of the decade, a switch from Chess to Mercury Records led to the recording of some of his poorest work. Four years later he went back to Chess and, with "My Ding-a-ling", had the biggest hit in his career. A smutty ditty recorded live and purportedly without Berry's knowledge at a 1972 UK concert, it achieved what none of his previous recordings had: a million sales and Number 1 status in the UK charts.

Over the last 20 years Berry has virtually bowed out of the music business. He does still occasionally perform live, even though his negotiating prowess (Berry hasn't had a manager since 1955) is nearly as legendary as his musical talent. Despite hints to the contrary, Berry's last album of new material is likely to remain 1979's trenchant "Rocket", even if he can't quite bring himself to retire.

In 1979 he went back to prison for 120 days after pleading guilty to tax evasion. In the late Eighties he celebrated his 60th birthday by participating in the documentary film "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" and finishing his autobiography (a literary work almost as remarkable as his music). A raid on Berry's estate in 1990 yielded a minuscule amount of marijuana and received a suspended sentence. In 1993 Berry performed at President Bill Clinton's inauguration.

The hits in the Billboard Hot 100 :