Chuck Berry – Biography Of The Father Of Rock And Roll

Chuck Berry Biography

Chuck Berry, fountainhead of the rock guitar and first citizen of the hallowed halls of rock and roll music, has been hailed by rock and roll fanatics, guitarists and guitar-lovers of every generation as the ‘Father of Rock and Roll’.

He comes closest to being the one individual that can rightfully be credited with inventing rock and roll as we’ve come to know it today. He is one of the greatest guitarists and song-writers the world has ever known. His seminal influence on the world of music has been acknowledged by every rock musician in his wake.

Chuck Berry not only breathed life into the rock and roll sound, he infused vital energy and spirit into the rock and roll attitude. His masterfully crafted compositions were an astonishing blend of traditional black rhythm and blues with white country, jazz and western licks, and they transcended race, class and age barriers to capture the imagination of a wide variety of cosmopolitan audiences.

The thumping, foot-tapping guitar licks and the magic of the witty, rapid-fire lyrics complete with sly references to cars, girls and growing-up pains became the anthems of a generation.

Berry’s music has managed to stand the test of time and reverberated through the ensuing decades to excite music connoisseurs even in the twenty-first century. To this day, his songs are essential listening for every true rock fan. Bequeathing his talent with the reverence it deserves, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Chuck Berry #6 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. Here is the Chuck Berry Biography…

The Beginning Of The Legend – Chuck Berry

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born on October 18, 1926 in St. Louis in a middle-class African-American household. His father was a contractor and Deacon at the local Baptist Church and his mother was a school principal. Chuck’s early introduction to music was at the age of six when he began singing regularly for the church choir.

Chuck Berry got a taste of stardom while he was still a high-schooler at Sumner High School when he participated in a musical revue at school in 1941. His flamboyant rendition of ‘Confessin The blues’ by Jay McShann was wildly applauded by the student audience even as it earned him the school management’s wrath. Thrilled with the high of performing his favorite music before an appreciative audience, Chuck took up learning the guitar in earnest. A local barber taught him the nuances of the art on a four-string tenor guitar and Chuck quickly progressed to a regular six-string guitar. Within a few weeks, he had mastered the chord progressions and rhythmic strums of the popular songs of the era.

His music education received a rude setback when he was arrested for armed robbery in 1944, while still at high school. With their car stalled in the middle of the highway and no way to reach home, Chuck and his friends had attempted to flag down a car using a non-functioning pistol. The law took a grim stand of the situation and he was sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Jefferson City, to be released in 1947, at the age of 21.

From then on, Chuck Berry picked up the threads of his musical career with great gusto. He worked at various jobs as a janitor, freelance photographer, an assembly plant worker and even as a trained beautician during the day and moonlighted as a musician by night, working small clubs and gatherings with his guitar. By then he had mastered both, the distinctive guitar riffs as well as the showmanship of blues greats such as Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker and developed a definite stage presence of his own. In 1952, Chuck was invited by Johnnie Johnson to play with the popular Johnnie Johnson Trio, the house band at The Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis.

It was at The Cosmopolitan that Chuck’s shrewd showmanship took center stage. He adroitly took up playing all kinds of music – country tunes, hillbilly songs, calypso rhythms, blues and western licks and everything that would please the cosmopolitan crowd of the club. He sang Muddy Waters and Nat King Cole numbers for the predominantly black audience but with a distinct diction, and hillbilly songs to appeal to a white audience. Soon, word spread about Chuck’s unique country/blues/hillbilly sound and by 1953, Chuck was drawing in a crowd that was 40% white, a testimony to his ploy paying off. In his own words:

“When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. All in all, it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.”

It was a ploy that would hold him in good stead in the later years of his musical career.

Not content with playing at the club level, Chuck Berry was looking to cut his own record when a chance meeting with his idol Muddy Waters on a trip to Chicago in 1955 brought a major turning point in Berry’s life. Waters guided him to Leonard Chess, the owner of Chess Records who was willing to listen to Berry’s creations. Chess was most impressed with the hillbilly pieces of Berry’s recordings and realized that he had found the sound he was looking for, to revitalize the dwindling sales of Chess Records.

A Rock And Roll Star Starts To Shine

It wasn’t Berry’s blues numbers but a hillbilly R&B hybrid with an upbeat tempo called ‘Ida Red’ on his audition tape that really caught Chess’s fancy. At Chess’s behest, Berry reworked it as ‘Maybellene’ and on its release in 1955, the song shot up the billboard charts to land at #5 and #1 on the R&B charts, establishing Chuck Berry as the shining new star on the rock and roll horizon. The scorching guitar solo in the interlude, a thumping tempo and amazingly imaginative lyrics of the song fired the imagination of black listeners and white teenagers alike and catapulted Chuck Berry to a place in rock and roll history as the first black musician to successfully cross over to the predominantly white, mainstream pop charts.

Between 1956 and 1959, Chuck Berry with his red Gibson ES-355 guitar churned out a slew of hits, all masterpieces of the era that configured rock and roll’s template. These included ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Rock and Roll Music’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘School days’, ‘Too Much Monkey Business’, ‘Memphis’, ‘Tennessee’, ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’ and the unparalleled ‘Johnny B. Good’.

The thumping songs with their catchy guitar riffs and aphrodisiac wordplay celebrated the defiantly exuberant teen spirit of the period. During this time, he developed his famous ‘Duckwalk’ that had the audience in raptures with his flamboyant act. Chuck Berry had his finger on the pulse of popular music and within a year, he reached the topmost echelons of stardom and sauntered into the annals of rock and roll history with his music.

Chuck Berry – Johnny B. Goode – Live

Not So Goode

In 1959, fate played a cruel joke on Berry when he again had a run-in with the law. Berry had invested his hard-earned money in opening a racially mixed nightclub called Club Bandstand in St. Louis that had uptight white locals seething. Berry had brought a 14 year old apache girl from Mexico and hired as a hat-check girl at his club. The girl was arrested for prostitution after Berry had fired her from his night club and Berry was arrested under the Mann Act “for bringing a minor across state lines for immoral purposes”. After two racially- colored trials, Berry was convicted and sentenced to a five year prison term.

While Berry was out of the spotlight serving his sentence, his music and distinctive guitar licks were eagerly being emulated by apprentices across the seas. British groups The Beatles and The Rolling Stones based their music on Chuck Berry’s style with the Rolling Stones’ first album mainly comprising covers of Chuck Berry hits. A fledgling American band called The Beach Boys got its first top ten hit with ‘Surfin U.S.A’ which was a blatant copy of Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. When Berry was released from prison in 1963, he sued the band for copyright infringement and was awarded co-writing credits.

Moving On

Berry picked up from where he had left off and issued a spate of hits in 1964-65 comprising ‘Nadine’, ‘Promised Land’, ‘You Can Never Tell’ and ‘No Particular Place To Go’. In 1966, he left Chess Records and joined Mercury Records. The collaboration proved disastrous for Berry with the hits drying up completely. He returned to Chess Records in the early seventies and released his lone #1 Billboard hit, the double entendre filled novelty single “My Ding-a-Ling” in 1972.

In 1979, Berry performed at the White House at the request of President Jimmy Carter and a month later was again sent to prison for five months on charges of tax evasion. In 1984, Berry was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1986, he was the first inductee into the newly instituted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was inducted by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones who while doing the honors said:

“It’s hard for me to induct Chuck Berry, because I lifted every lick he ever played!”

Chuck Berry’s music has left a lasting imprint on the sands of time and its impact is being felt even today, sixty years after it was first recorded. John Lennon put it best when he said:

“If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you could call it Chuck Berry.”

Some Interesting Chuck Berry Facts

• Chuck Berry has a vast collection of old Cadillacs stored away in a warehouse.

• The seminal Johnny B. Goode was included in the 1985 Steven Spielberg flick ‘Back To The Future’ with Michael J. Fox even performing the duckwalk to it.

• The most eloquent testimony to Berry’s talent was when a recording of Johnny B. Good was hurtled into space on the Voyager 1 space probe, so that if found by far-off civilizations in the universe, it could acquaint them with the culture on earth.

• Berry loved photography and his photographs of the famous are hanging in galleries across the world.

• In 1988, Berry had to pay a $250 fine to settle a dispute with a woman he punched in the mouth. The woman received six stitches to sew up the injury.

• In 1986, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

• Although Chuck Berry did not smoke or drink, he had a more than healthy appetite for sex. He says in his autobiography that he “could never resist the temptations of a little queenie”.

Chuck Berry Biography By Scotty Smith
Guitarist Rock ©2008-2009

Photos by Photobucket