The story of Chuck Berry

A boy from the Ville

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on the eighteenth of October 1926. He was one of six children. His father Henry was a carpenter and contractor who served as a deacon at a Baptist church, and his mother Martha was an educated woman who had trained to teach. The family lived in the Ville, a north St. Louis neighborhood where working Black families lived alongside the city's Black doctors, lawyers and newspaper owners. The house where he was born stood on Goode Avenue, a street name that would one day end up in the title of one of rock and roll's most famous songs. His parents wanted their children to read, to know poetry and to speak properly, and that lesson stuck. Clear, precise diction became one of his trademarks as a singer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Growing up in a segregated city left marks. Berry later said the first white people he ever saw were firefighters who came to put out a blaze in his neighborhood, and he never forgot the day his family was refused tickets to a 1935 film because they were Black. Music was everywhere at home. The family sang in church, and the radio brought country singers like Gene Autry and Bill Monroe. Chuck soaked up boogie woogie, swing and jump blues, and he loved Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole and the guitarists T-Bone Walker and Lonnie Johnson. In 1941, at a revue at Sumner High School, he sang the blues hit Confessin' the Blues while a friend named Tommy Stevens played guitar. The sound of that guitar hooked him, and he borrowed a four string instrument and practiced for hours.[1] [2]

As a teenager Berry went looking for trouble. One night he drank half a pint of whiskey, and it made him so sick that he swore off alcohol for good. In the summer of 1944 he had effectively dropped out of school, and he set off for California with two friends in his own 1937 Oldsmobile. By Kansas City they were broke, cold and homesick. One friend robbed a bakery, and the three of them went on to rob more businesses and steal a car at gunpoint, with Berry waving a broken pistol he had found. State troopers caught them near Kingdom City, Missouri. Their lawyer told them to plead guilty and hope for mercy. The trial reportedly lasted twenty one minutes, and each young man was sentenced to ten years, the maximum.[1] [2]

Berry was sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, near Jefferson City. Black and white inmates slept in separate dormitories, and Black prisoners were punished harder for the same offenses. He kept his head down, made friends with an inmate leader who protected him, and threw himself into music and sport. He formed a gospel singing quartet, singing bass himself, and it became good enough that the authorities let it perform outside the prison. He also took up boxing and reached a Golden Gloves tournament in St. Louis, where he finished as runner up in the novice heavyweight class before a bigger man knocked him out. That ended his boxing career. A model inmate, he was paroled on his twenty first birthday, the eighteenth of October 1947.[1] [2]

Back home, Berry went to work with his father and bought a Buick on credit. At a May Day festival in 1948 he spotted a young woman named Themetta Suggs eating an ice cream cone, spent all his money on her that afternoon, and nicknamed her Toddy. They married on the twenty eighth of October 1948, and their daughter Darlin Ingrid was born in October 1950. To support the family he worked on car assembly lines, as a janitor in their apartment building, and then trained as a beautician at the Poro College of Cosmetology. By 1950 he could afford a small brick cottage on Whittier Street. He lived there for eight years, and it was in that modest house that he wrote most of the songs that made him famous.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Black hillbilly of East St. Louis

By the early 1950s Berry was earning extra money playing guitar and singing at clubs and parties, at around four dollars a night. He had taken guitar lessons from a jazz playing friend named Ira Harris and was borrowing licks and stage moves from T-Bone Walker. In June 1952 his old school friend Tommy Stevens invited him to join his trio on Saturday nights. Berry started slipping country songs into the set, which puzzled the mostly Black audience at first. He later wrote that people began whispering about the Black hillbilly on stage. After laughing at him for a while, the crowd started requesting the country tunes and dancing to them. Mixing styles that were supposed to stay apart would become his secret weapon.[1] [2]

The partnership that shaped his sound began at the very end of 1952. Johnnie Johnson was a pianist from Fairmont, West Virginia, who had served as one of the first Black Marines at Montford Point during the Second World War. He had moved to St. Louis that year and led the Sir John Trio, with Ebby Hardy on drums, at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis. On New Year's Eve the trio's saxophonist, Alvin Bennett, had a stroke. Johnson called Berry because he figured an inexperienced young guitarist would be free that night. Berry brought vocals, jokes and showmanship, and he soon became a permanent member. Before long the band was billed under Berry's name. Johnson later joked that Berry also had a car, and wheels beat walking.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the Cosmopolitan, the trio played blues, ballads and hillbilly songs, often in one set. Berry sang in the smooth style of Nat King Cole over music with the grit of Muddy Waters, and word spread across the river. Soon white fans, including well off ones, were coming to the club too. In 1954 Berry made his first record, singing with a group called Joe Alexander and the Cubans on a small label named Ballad. The crowd favorite at the club, though, was a fast, country flavored number he called Ida May. It was built on Ida Red, an old fiddle tune that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys had made popular in 1938. Berry said Wills's version was his favorite song to play at the mixed clubs he called salt and pepper clubs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 1955 Berry drove to Chicago with a friend to see the blues scene. They caught Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James, and ended the night watching Muddy Waters. Afterward Berry asked his hero who he should talk to about making records. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess. The next morning Berry caught Chess walking into his building. Chess liked his enthusiasm and asked to hear new material. Berry went home, recorded four songs, and was back in Chicago about a week later. He assumed the blues number Wee Wee Hours would be the one that got him signed. Instead Leonard Chess lit up at Ida May, and later said he loved the idea of a hillbilly song sung by a Black man.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty first of May 1955 Berry recorded the song in Chicago with Johnnie Johnson on piano, Ebby Hardy on drums and Willie Dixon on bass, with maracas added for a bigger beat. Leonard Chess pushed for changes. He wanted the lyrics to be about the things teenagers cared about, which he summed up as cars, a big beat and young love. Berry reworked the words from his own memories of trying to get girls to ride in his old V8 Ford. The title also had to go, because Chess thought Ida May sounded too rural. The new name was Maybellene, spelled so as to avoid trouble with the cosmetics company whose name it resembled. The story of who picked it is still argued about.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Maybellene and the new sound

Chess released Maybellene in July 1955, with Wee Wee Hours on the other side. It opened with guitar chords that sounded like a car horn and never let up, and teenagers loved its tale of a Ford chasing a Cadillac. The song went to number one on Billboard's rhythm and blues chart and reached number five on the pop chart in September 1955. It was one of the first records to cross the rhythm and blues, country and pop charts at once, and it had sold a million copies by the end of the year. Rolling Stone later summed it up by saying rock and roll guitar starts here. Berry himself said it arrived at the right moment, just as Black music was spilling into the mainstream.[1] [2] [3]

The first hit also taught Berry his first hard lesson about the business. When he saw a copy of the record, he found two other names in the writing credit. One was the powerful disc jockey Alan Freed, and the other was Russ Fratto, a printer who was also the landlord of Chess's first offices. In the 1950s, giving a songwriting share to a helpful disc jockey was a common way of buying airplay, and Freed played Maybellene constantly. Berry later said Freed never wrote a note with him. Berry eventually won back full credit, and the extra names were withdrawn in 1986. Of the Chess brothers he later said they were not honest, but they gave him his first chance and were good to him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Touring the South showed Berry just how new his music was. At a show in Mobile, Alabama, ropes ran down the middle of the floor to separate Black and white fans. He opened with Maybellene and, to his surprise, the white side cheered loudest, so he won over the Black side with the slow blues of Wee Wee Hours. Afterward police surrounded the band's bus. In Knoxville, Tennessee, he arrived for a booking at a country dance, only to be told the organizers had no idea the singer of Maybellene was Black. The manager said a city rule barred him from playing. Berry left, came back at showtime, and listened to another band perform his songs.[1]

In April 1956 Berry recorded Roll Over Beethoven, a song that grew out of a family rivalry. His sister Lucy was always at the family piano playing classical music when he wanted to play popular songs. The record reached number two on the rhythm and blues chart and number twenty nine on the pop chart, and in 2003 it was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. That same month he cut Too Much Monkey Business and Brown Eyed Handsome Man. The second was inspired by a trip to California where he saw police arresting a Hispanic man while a woman shouted for them to let him go. Critics have long pointed out how slyly that song played with racial fears of the day.[1] [2] [3]

By mid 1956 Berry was touring as one of the Top Acts of Fifty Six alongside Carl Perkins, who became a friend and said he could hear country music in Berry's writing. That summer Berry filmed a scene for Rock, Rock, Rock!, an Alan Freed movie shot in the Bronx, singing You Can't Catch Me. It was one of the first rock and roll films to get a soundtrack album. In late 1957 he joined Freed's Biggest Show of Stars tour with Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. On stage he had a move that stopped audiences in their tracks, a crouching glide across the boards on bent knees. He said a journalist named it the duck walk when he first did it in New York.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The golden years

From 1957 to 1959 Berry put more than a dozen singles on the charts. School Days, recorded in January 1957, reached number three on the pop chart and number one on the rhythm and blues chart, and it was his first record to chart in Britain. Its closing call to hail rock and roll would later give a famous film its title. Rock and Roll Music followed that autumn and reached the top ten. Chess also put out his first album, After School Session, one of the label's first long playing records. Berry was now over thirty and married with children, yet he was writing about high school, first cars and dances better than anyone. The critic Robert Christgau noted he was the oldest of all the rock and roll originals.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Sweet Little Sixteen, recorded at the end of December 1957 and released in January 1958, became one of his biggest hits. It reached number two on the Billboard pop chart and topped the rhythm and blues chart. That summer he played the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, sharing a bill with Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson. His performance of Sweet Little Sixteen was filmed for the documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day, which the Library of Congress later chose for preservation. Seeing a rock and roller duck walking among jazz royalty was a sign of how far his music had already travelled in three years.[1] [2] [3]

In 1958 came Johnny B. Goode, the song most people think of first. Berry had started writing it in 1955. It tells of a poor country boy from near New Orleans who plays guitar so well he might see his name in lights one day. Berry admitted it was partly about himself, and the title nodded to Goode Avenue, where he was born. He said his first draft described the boy's race, but he changed it to country so white radio would play it. The opening riff borrowed from a 1946 solo by Carl Hogan on a Louis Jordan record, which Berry happily acknowledged. The single reached number eight on the pop chart and number two on the rhythm and blues chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sessions for Johnny B. Goode featured Lafayette Leake on piano instead of Johnnie Johnson, with Willie Dixon on bass and Fred Below on drums. Berry explained his guitar style as a little Carl Hogan, a little T-Bone Walker and a little Charlie Christian, and he said keeping it simple was the point. The hits kept coming, with Carol and a Christmas song called Run Rudolph Run in 1958. In July 1958 he recorded Memphis, Tennessee at his own home in St. Louis, playing the bass part himself with only a drummer beside him. Its tender story of a father trying to reach his little daughter would become one of the most covered songs he ever wrote.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In January 1959 Berry filmed Go, Johnny, Go!, playing himself as Alan Freed's friend and partner in a story about a young singer. It was an unusual role for a Black performer at the time, and the film also featured Ritchie Valens, who died in the plane crash with Buddy Holly shortly after filming. Berry was now a wealthy star, and he was investing. He opened Berry's Club Bandstand in St. Louis, a racially integrated nightclub, and put money into real estate. Little Queenie and Almost Grown were on the radio in 1959, and his third album, Berry Is on Top, was so full of hits that one critic called it almost a greatest hits collection on its own.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Arrests, trials and prison

Here the story turns dark. On the night of the second of June 1958, Berry was driving through St. Charles, Missouri, with a seventeen year old woman named Joan Mathis when he got a flat tire. A state trooper stopped, searched the car and found nineteen hundred dollars in cash and a revolver, which Berry said he carried when he had large sums of money. He was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Police encouraged Mathis to say he had molested her, but she insisted he had not, and later that month he got off with minor fines. In August 1959, after a show at an army base in Meridian, Mississippi, a white girl hugged and kissed him too long on stage.[1]

After that Meridian show, a group of young white men surrounded Berry, furious that he had supposedly asked a white woman for a date. A policeman had to rescue him, and at the station a sergeant took the seven hundred dollars he had on him to cover a fine for disturbing the peace. Worse was to come. On the first of December 1959, during a visit to El Paso, Texas, Berry crossed into Juárez, Mexico, and met a girl named Janice Escalanti in a cantina. She was a fourteen year old Apache runaway. Berry took her back to St. Louis, saying he meant to give her a job as a hatcheck girl at Club Bandstand.[1] [2] [3]

Escalanti did not last at the club. Berry fired her, gave her money for a ticket home and left her at a bus station, but she tried to return, and when he turned her away she went to the police. On the twenty first of December 1959 he was arrested under the Mann Act, a 1910 federal law against transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. The law had a long history of being used against Black men, including the boxer Jack Johnson. Berry always denied any sexual contact with the girl, while she said they had sex in several states. At his first trial in March 1960 he was convicted, fined five thousand dollars and sentenced to five years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The judge at that first trial repeatedly used a racial slur and called Berry the most vicious character he had ever sentenced. On appeal, the verdict was thrown out because the judge's language was judged prejudicial. Prosecutors also brought a separate Mann Act case involving Joan Mathis, but she testified that she loved him and never supported the charges, and he was acquitted. Meanwhile, in 1960 he closed Club Bandstand and opened Berry Park, a thirty acre country club retreat near Wentzville with a guitar shaped swimming pool. At a retrial in 1961 over Escalanti, the prosecutor reminded the jury that Berry's music was aimed at teenagers. He was convicted again and sentenced to three years.[1] [2] [3]

After a final appeal failed, Berry entered federal prison in February 1962 and was released in October 1963, having served about a year and a half. His last single before going in had been Come On, which failed to chart in America. Behind bars he kept writing. He composed You Never Can Tell there, and for Promised Land he borrowed an atlas from the prison library to plot a cross country journey. Many who knew him said the experience changed him. He grew more guarded, more suspicious of promoters and the press, and years later he would turn cold or angry when interviewers raised the case, sometimes even denying he had served time for it.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The British bands bring him back

While Berry was locked away, his songs had crossed the Atlantic. In Britain, young bands learned to play by copying his records. The Beatles recorded Roll Over Beethoven in 1963 and Rock and Roll Music in 1964. The Rolling Stones, whose Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had renewed their friendship over a Chuck Berry album on a train platform, chose Come On as their very first single in June 1963. In America, the Beach Boys scored a huge 1963 hit with Surfin' U.S.A., which set new words to the tune of Sweet Little Sixteen. Under pressure from Berry's publisher, the band's father and manager Murry Wilson handed the song's copyright to Arc Music, and Berry was later credited as writer.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Berry walked out of prison into a world that was suddenly hungry for him. His first session, in November 1963, produced Nadine, a breathless chase story that he said he built from Maybellene. It came out in February 1964. Then came No Particular Place to Go, which reused the music of School Days for a comic tale about a couple defeated by a car seat belt, and You Never Can Tell, about a teenage wedding. Promised Land followed at the end of the year. Christgau later argued Promised Land was a coded history of the Freedom Rides that few noticed at the time. For many critics, 1964 produced some of the best songs he ever wrote.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In May 1964 Berry toured Britain with Carl Perkins, backed by the young band the Animals. Perkins had been nervous that nobody would come, but Berry assured him they were bigger in Britain than at home, and he was right. Perkins was shocked by his old friend, though. He said he had never seen a man so changed, describing Berry as cold, distant and bitter. He blamed years of one night stands, but mostly prison. When Berry returned to Britain in January 1965, his moods were erratic, and his habit of using unrehearsed local backing bands under strict contracts was earning him a reputation as a difficult performer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In late October 1964 Berry was filmed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the T.A.M.I. Show, a concert film that also featured the Rolling Stones, James Brown and the Supremes. That same year he and Bo Diddley released a joint album called Two Great Guitars. In 1966 he left Chess for Mercury Records. He made five albums for Mercury, and although this was not a strong period for his studio work, he remained a top concert draw. The Mercury albums included Live at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in 1967. His backing band that night was a young group then called the Steve Miller Blues Band, and the record became their first release too.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

As the sixties ended, Berry was welcomed as a founding father by the rock generation. In July 1969 he played the Schaefer Music Festival in New York's Central Park. On the thirteenth of September 1969 he played the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival at Varsity Stadium in front of more than twenty thousand people, on a bill with Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley and the Doors. The day is best remembered for a surprise appearance by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band. Berry was backed by local Toronto musicians, as usual, and his full set was filmed by the documentary maker D. A. Pennebaker.[1] [2]

Ding a Ling and the lonely road

Berry returned to Chess in 1970 and made the album Back Home, which included the defiant song Tulane. Chess had already sent Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters to record with British musicians in London, and in 1972 it was Berry's turn. The live half of The London Chuck Berry Sessions was recorded on the third of February 1972 at the Lanchester Arts Festival in Coventry, where he topped a bill that included Pink Floyd, Slade and Billy Preston. The crowd would not let him go. The tape ends with festival staff pleading with the audience to leave so Pink Floyd could set up, while the fans chant for Chuck. That same month he appeared on The Mike Douglas Show with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Coventry tape contained a long, rowdy singalong called My Ding a Ling. It was not his song. Dave Bartholomew had written and recorded it in 1952, and Berry had cut a version called My Tambourine in 1968. Edited down for a single, the live version went to number one in both America and Britain in 1972, his only chart topper in either country. Many radio stations refused to play its double meanings, and the British campaigner Mary Whitehouse tried and failed to get it banned. Critics called it juvenile, but Berry counted it among his best because it made him rich all over again. A live Reelin' and Rockin' became his last top forty hit.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Through the seventies Berry worked the oldies circuit alone. He travelled with just his guitar and required promoters to supply a local band that knew his songs, with no rehearsal. He was known for demanding cash in advance, and PBS reported he liked it in a paper bag, which went into his attaché case. Among the young musicians who backed him were Steve Miller and Bruce Springsteen, whose band played behind him at the University of Maryland in 1973. Berry turned up minutes before showtime. When Springsteen nervously asked what songs they would do, Berry answered, Chuck Berry songs. The results could be thrilling or sloppy, and some critics said the ragged shows hurt his reputation.[1] [2] [3]

The cash habit caught up with him. The Internal Revenue Service went through his earnings, and in 1979 Berry pleaded guilty to evading nearly one hundred and ten thousand dollars in federal income tax on his 1973 income. On the first of June 1979, about a month before he went back to prison, he played at the White House at the invitation of President Jimmy Carter. He then served four months at a prison camp in Lompoc, California, and was ordered to do a thousand hours of community service, playing benefit concerts. While at Lompoc he began writing his autobiography. That year Atco also released Rockit, which would be his last studio album for thirty eight years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hail Hail and hard truths

In 1984 Berry received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. On the twenty third of January 1986 he was named in the very first class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Ray Charles and others, and he was the first inductee of that class. Keith Richards gave the induction speech and admitted he found it hard to talk about a man whose every lick he had lifted. The Hall's own citation said that while no one person invented rock and roll, Berry came closest to putting all the pieces together. His autobiography came out the following year, and the Guardian later judged that he clearly needed no ghostwriter and wrote with a strong sense of Black history.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

That induction dinner led to a film. Keith Richards and director Taylor Hackford planned a concert for Berry's sixtieth birthday, and Richards moved into Berry Park for weeks to rehearse a band. He later said it was a childhood dream, and recalled finding Berry shampooing the carpet at three in the morning. Two shows took place on the sixteenth of October 1986 at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, a venue Berry had once been barred from as a Black man. Guests included Eric Clapton, Etta James, Robert Cray, Linda Ronstadt and Julian Lennon, and Johnnie Johnson was back on piano. Johnson had been driving a bus in St. Louis, and the film relaunched his career.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The resulting film, Hail Hail Rock and Roll, released in 1987, was not the tribute anyone expected. Berry was prickly and controlling on camera. In one famous rehearsal scene he keeps correcting Richards on the intro to Carol, and Richards later said Berry was simply toying with him. At one show Berry exploded over a sound adjustment, shouting that these were his songs. He had strained his voice at a cold outdoor concert the day before, so his lead vocals were overdubbed later in a studio. Richards called him a lonely man, shaped by years of living as a one man show. Berry himself loved the film.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Serious allegations followed. In December 1987 Berry was charged after a woman was injured at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. She suffered cuts to her mouth that needed five stitches, loosened teeth and bruising to her face. Berry never spoke publicly about it, and in November 1988 he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of harassment and paid a two hundred and fifty dollar fine. Around the same time he bought the Southern Air, a restaurant in Wentzville, Missouri. His application for a liquor license there was turned down because of his criminal record.[1] [2]

Then came what Rolling Stone called perhaps the worst disgrace of his life. Women who had worked at or visited the Southern Air accused Berry of hiding a video camera in the women's restroom and secretly filming them. In 1990 police raided his home and found videotapes of women and sixty two grams of marijuana. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor marijuana possession and got a six month suspended sentence, probation and an order to donate five thousand dollars to a hospital. Berry said the camera was meant to catch a worker stealing, and his lawyers called the lawsuits a plot to get his money. His guilt was never proven in court, but he settled a class action by fifty nine women in 1994 for a reported one point two million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Blueberry Hill years

As a founding father, Berry was now called on for the big occasions. In June 1993 he joined Pete Townshend and Billy Joel at the groundbreaking for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame building in Cleveland. On the second of September 1995 he opened the all star concert celebrating its opening, in front of fifty seven thousand people, backed once again by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He played at Bill Clinton's inauguration events, and in 2000 he received the Kennedy Center Honors, with his wife Themetta beside him. Clinton later said the man and his music were inseparable.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In November 1996 Berry began playing one Wednesday a month in the Duck Room at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and music club in the Delmar Loop of University City, just outside St. Louis, owned by his friend Joe Edwards. He kept the residency for eighteen years. His band there included his son Charles Berry Junior on guitar and his daughter Ingrid on vocals and harmonica. Charles Junior said the shows had no rehearsals and no set list, and the band watched his father's guitar neck and feet for cues. They still toured too. In January 2007 they played seventeen shows in about eighteen days, starting in Moscow, where thousands of fans who could not get in waited outside.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 2000 Johnnie Johnson sued Berry, claiming he had co written more than fifty songs credited to Berry alone, including Roll Over Beethoven and Sweet Little Sixteen. The suit, which Keith Richards had encouraged, argued that Berry had taken advantage of Johnson's drinking. A judge dismissed it because too much time had passed. In 2001 Johnson entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a sideman. The friendship survived. When Johnson died on the thirteenth of April 2005, aged eighty, Berry went to Blueberry Hill, where they had last played together, and called him the man with a dynamite right hand and the greatest piano player he ever had.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Berry was still on the road in his eighties, touring Europe in 2008. On New Year's Day 2011, at the Congress Theater in Chicago, a show fell apart. After about an hour of stopping and restarting songs and struggling with his guitar's tuning, the eighty four year old slumped over a keyboard and was helped off stage. He came back only to thank the fans and left doing a little duck walk. His friends blamed exhaustion, since it was his third show in two days. That summer, on the twenty ninth of July 2011, an eight foot statue of him was unveiled across from Blueberry Hill. A former council member had petitioned against it, calling him a felon, but hundreds of fans came to cheer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The honors kept coming. In February 2012 Berry and Leonard Cohen received the first PEN New England award for song lyrics of literary excellence, at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Cohen used his speech to say that all songwriters were footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry, and Bob Dylan sent a message calling Berry the Shakespeare of rock and roll. In October 2012 the Rock Hall made him its American Music Masters honoree. In August 2014 he was named a laureate of Sweden's Polar Music Prize, but at eighty seven he was too ill to travel, and Dave Edmunds accepted for him. His regular Blueberry Hill residency ended in October 2014.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The last album and the legacy

On his ninetieth birthday, the eighteenth of October 2016, Berry surprised everyone by announcing a new album, his first of new songs since 1979. It was called simply Chuck, and it had been recorded in St. Louis over several years with the Blueberry Hill band and his children Charles Junior and Ingrid. He dedicated it to his wife, whom he still called Toddy, and said that he was growing old and could now hang up his shoes. He had hinted at it four years earlier, telling reporters in Cleveland that he had new songs and wanted to push them out. It sounded like a farewell, and it was.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On Saturday the eighteenth of March 2017, emergency workers were called to Berry's home on Buckner Road near Wentzville, Missouri, at about twenty to one in the afternoon. They found him unresponsive and could not revive him, and he was pronounced dead at twenty six minutes past one. He was ninety, and his family said he died surrounded by love. Tributes poured in. Bruce Springsteen called him the greatest pure rock and roll writer who ever lived. Mick Jagger thanked him for lighting up the Stones' teenage years, and Keith Richards wrote that one of his big lights had gone out. John Lennon's old line was repeated everywhere, that another name for rock and roll might be Chuck Berry.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the ninth of April 2017, fans lined up before dawn at The Pageant, a St. Louis club where Berry had often played, for a public viewing. He lay in an open casket wearing his familiar captain's cap, with a cherry red Gibson guitar bolted inside the lid. The Rolling Stones sent flowers in the shape of a guitar. At the private service that followed, Gene Simmons of Kiss gave an unplanned eulogy, while Little Richard, who had been due to lead the procession, was too ill to attend. Berry was laid to rest in a mausoleum at Bellerive Gardens Cemetery in St. Louis. One of his lawyers estimated his estate at around fifty million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck was released on the sixteenth of June 2017, three months after his death. The first single, Big Boys, featured Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine on guitar and was Berry's first new single in about forty years. The album included Lady B. Goode, a sequel to his most famous song written with his wife in mind, and it reached number nine in Britain, his first top ten album there since 1977. Reviewers were warm. Some heard a man looking back at his own fall with rare tenderness, especially in the spoken song Dutchman, about an old man who was once a great artist. Rolling Stone heard a tenderness and vulnerability that his earlier music had never shown.[1] [2] [3]

Berry's music has travelled further than any other rock and roll. Johnny B. Goode is the only rock and roll song on the Voyager Golden Record, launched into space in 1977. In 2020 a crater on Mercury was named after him, and in January 2021 Run Rudolph Run finally reached the Billboard top ten, sixty two years after it first charted. Rolling Stone ranked him the second greatest guitarist of all time in 2023. His legacy also carries the harm he did. Writers after his death argued that the girls and women he exploited deserve to be part of his story, not a footnote to it. Aerosmith's Joe Perry put it simply. If you want to learn rock and roll, he said, you have to start with Chuck Berry.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry and Themetta Berry. He met Themetta Suggs at a May Day festival in 1948 and married her that October, calling her Toddy. Berry was repeatedly unfaithful, and his scandals humiliated her, yet she stayed for sixty eight years. Late in life, Rolling Stone wrote, he watched the Cardinals while she read her Bible. His final album was dedicated to her, and it includes a song written with her in mind.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson. Johnson gave Berry his first real gig on New Year's Eve 1952, then watched the band take Berry's name. His rolling piano was half the Chuck Berry sound for years, and they played on and off for five decades. In 2000 Johnson sued over songwriting credit and lost on a technicality, but the bond held, and when Johnson died in 2005 Berry called him the greatest piano player he ever had.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck Berry and Leonard Chess. Leonard Chess and his brother Phil, Polish Jewish immigrants who built Chicago's great blues label, signed Berry in 1955 and produced his classic records. Leonard heard the hit in a country tune and pushed for the lyrics about cars and young love. Berry's verdict was mixed. He said the brothers were not honest, but they gave him his first chance and were good to him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chuck Berry and Alan Freed. The disc jockey who popularized the phrase rock and roll helped make Maybellene a national hit, and took a share of its writing credit for it. Berry resented the credit but kept working with Freed, appearing in his films Rock, Rock, Rock! and Go, Johnny, Go!, in which Berry played Freed's friend, and on his package tours. Both men were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's first class.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chuck Berry and Keith Richards. Richards learned to play by copying Berry's solos and said Berry was the air he breathed. The hero was not always kind. Berry punched him for touching his guitar, threw him off stage and needled him in rehearsals, and Richards once said he could not warm to Berry even if he was cremated next to him. Still, he inducted Berry into the Hall of Fame, made Hail Hail Rock and Roll with him, and mourned him deeply.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins. The two became friends on the Top Acts of Fifty Six tour, and Perkins admired the country music he heard in Berry's songs. In 1964 Berry persuaded a nervous Perkins that British crowds still loved them, and they toured together. Perkins was shaken by how prison had changed his friend, describing him as cold, distant and bitter.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen. In 1973 an unknown Springsteen and his band backed Berry at the University of Maryland, and got the famous answer that they would play Chuck Berry songs. More than twenty years later they backed him again at the 1995 Rock Hall opening concert in Cleveland. When Berry died, Springsteen called him the greatest pure rock and roll writer who ever lived.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck Berry and John Lennon. The Beatles built their early sets on Berry songs, and Lennon sang lead on several of their covers. He famously said that if you gave rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry. In February 1972 Lennon got to play with his hero on The Mike Douglas Show, a slightly chaotic meeting remembered for Yoko Ono's wailing vocals, which visibly startled Berry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chuck Berry and Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson set new surfing lyrics to the tune of Sweet Little Sixteen, and Surfin' U.S.A. became a smash in 1963. Berry's publisher pressed the Beach Boys, and Murry Wilson gave up the copyright. There was tension at first, but Carl Wilson said Berry later told them in Copenhagen that he loved the song, and Brian Wilson paid warm tribute when Berry died.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck Berry and Ingrid Berry and Charles Berry Jr.. Two of Berry's four children became his bandmates in later life. Ingrid sang and played harmonica, and Charles Junior played guitar at the Blueberry Hill shows and on tours from Moscow to the Canary Islands. Charles Junior said his father never rehearsed and the band learned to watch his guitar neck. Both play on the final album, Chuck, and Charles Berry the third joins them on two tracks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. In May 1955 a young Berry watched Muddy Waters play in Chicago and then asked him how to make a record. Waters pointed him to Leonard Chess, the man who had made his own career. That one piece of advice put Berry on the label that would carry him to fame, alongside Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Bo Diddley.[1] [2] [3]

Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. Two of rock and roll's biggest egos were also fellow members of the Hall of Fame's first class. In Hail Hail Rock and Roll, Berry recalled that they became friends only after a fight, and admitted Lewis had beaten him. Asked how it started, Lewis said Berry claimed to be the king of rock and roll, and he said he was.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Chuck Berry

• Chuck Berry never drank alcohol after one bad night with half a pint of whiskey as a teenager. The whiskey did not make him drunk, but it made him so sick that he swore off drink for life. Decades later his friend Joe Edwards said Berry still did not smoke or drink, and cut his own grass.[1] [2]
• In reform school, Berry sang bass in a gospel quartet and boxed in a Golden Gloves tournament. The quartet was good enough to be allowed to perform outside the reformatory. In boxing he finished as runner up in the novice heavyweight class, but a bigger man knocked him out and he quit the ring.[1] [2]
• Before rock and roll, Berry trained as a beautician at a St. Louis cosmetology college. He studied at the Poro College of Cosmetology, founded by the pioneering Black businesswoman Annie Turnbo Malone, while also working in car assembly plants and as a janitor.[1]
• Berry's first record came out a year before Maybellene, as a singer with Joe Alexander and the Cubans. In 1954 he recorded two songs with the group, released as a single on the small Ballad label. It went nowhere, and Maybellene is usually treated as his real debut.[1]
• His modest St. Louis house joined the National Register of Historic Places while he was still alive. The brick house on Whittier Street, where he lived from 1950 to 1958 and wrote most of his classics, was listed in 2008. Such listings are unusual for sites tied to living people.[1]
• Chess Records tested new releases by playing them to people waiting at a bus stop. Phil Chess said the label would throw open its doors on South Cottage Grove Avenue and watch how people at the bus stop reacted. He said that test was right almost every time.[1]
• Roll Over Beethoven began as a sibling squabble over the family piano. Berry's sister Lucy used the piano to practice classical music when he wanted to play popular songs. The resulting single was later added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.[1]
• Brown Eyed Handsome Man was inspired by watching police arrest a Hispanic man in California. Berry saw a woman shouting at the officer to let the man go. The song went to number five on the rhythm and blues chart, and Buddy Holly's posthumous cover was a British hit.[1]
• Johnnie Johnson does not play on Johnny B. Goode, the song often said to be about him. The piano on the original recording is by Lafayette Leake, a Chess session player, backed by Willie Dixon on bass and Fred Below on drums.[1] [2]
• Berry recorded Memphis, Tennessee at home, playing the bass part himself. The July 1958 recording in St. Louis features only Berry on vocals, guitars and electric bass, with Jasper Thomas on drums. Keith Richards called the song untouchable.[1] [2]
• Go, Johnny, Go!, in which Berry played himself, was Ritchie Valens's only film. The 1959 Alan Freed movie was shot over five days in January 1959. Valens died in the plane crash with Buddy Holly soon afterward, before the film was released.[1]
• The man credited with co writing Run Rudolph Run may never have existed. The song is credited to Johnny Marks and M. Brodie. Berry said he wrote it alone and that M. Brodie was an invented name used to earn Marks and his publisher more money.[1]
• Run Rudolph Run reached the Billboard top ten in January 2021, sixty two years after it first charted. It first charted at number sixty nine in December 1958. Its climb to number ten set a record for the longest wait to reach the top ten, and gave Berry his first top ten hit since 1972.[1]
• Berry borrowed an atlas from the prison library to write Promised Land. He plotted a journey from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles while serving his Mann Act sentence. The Grateful Dead later played the song live more than four hundred times.[1] [2]
• No Particular Place to Go is a love song defeated by a car seat belt. Released in May 1964, it reused the music of School Days for a comic story about a couple who cannot unbuckle to go for a walk.[1] [2]
• Berry's only number one single was a song someone else wrote, recorded live in Coventry, England. My Ding a Ling was written by Dave Bartholomew in 1952. Berry's version was taped at the Lanchester Arts Festival in February 1972 and topped the charts in America and Britain.[1] [2]
• Pink Floyd had to wait while a Coventry crowd refused to let Chuck Berry leave the stage. At the end of the live side of The London Chuck Berry Sessions, festival staff can be heard trying to clear the audience for Pink Floyd while fans chant for Chuck.[1]
• Morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse tried and failed to get My Ding a Ling banned in Britain. She wrote to the BBC's director general complaining about schoolboys acting out the song. The BBC kept playing it, and the record reached number one.[1]
• The London Chuck Berry Sessions is his only album certified by the RIAA. It went gold within a month of its October 1972 release, thanks largely to My Ding a Ling, and remains his most successful album.[1]
• His 1979 tax evasion sentence included a thousand hours of community service, served as benefit concerts. Berry also spent four months at a prison camp in Lompoc, California, where he started writing his autobiography. A month before going in, he played at the White House for Jimmy Carter.[1] [2]
• The cover of his 1979 album Rockit showed his guitar flying through space like a Star Wars ship. The artwork pictured his Gibson orbiting the Earth in the style of the Millennium Falcon, a pun on the album title. It was his last studio album for thirty eight years.[1]
• Keith Richards once found Berry shampooing the carpet at three in the morning. Richards moved into Berry Park for weeks in 1986 to rehearse for Hail Hail Rock and Roll. He woke one night to find Berry outside his door with a huge machine, insisting the job had to get done.[1]
• Berry's singing in Hail Hail Rock and Roll was overdubbed in a studio after the concerts. He had strained his voice at a cold open air show the day before filming, so all of his lead vocals in the film were rerecorded later.[1]
• Keith Richards named his daughter Tara partly after the Chuck Berry song Jo Jo Gunne. Tara Jo Jo Gunne Richards was born in March 1976 and died of sudden infant death syndrome ten weeks later, while Richards was on tour.[1]
• Leonard Cohen said all songwriters are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry. He said it in February 2012 at the John F. Kennedy Library, where he and Berry shared the first PEN New England award for literary song lyrics. Bob Dylan sent a message calling Berry the Shakespeare of rock and roll.[1]
• Folklorist Alan Lomax objected to putting Johnny B. Goode on the Voyager Golden Record. Lomax called rock music adolescent. Carl Sagan replied that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet, and the song flew into space in 1977.[1]
• Many of Berry's original Chess master tapes were destroyed in a 2008 fire. A blaze at Universal Studios burned a warehouse of Universal Music masters. The company first said it had copies, but later reporting found the masters were lost.[1]
• Berry was buried with a cherry red Gibson guitar bolted inside his coffin lid. At his public viewing in April 2017 he also wore his trademark captain's cap. The Rolling Stones sent a guitar shaped flower arrangement.[1] [2] [3]
• A crater on the planet Mercury has been named after Chuck Berry since 2020. The International Astronomical Union gave his name to a small crater there, joining Johnny B. Goode's journey on the Voyager spacecraft as his second foothold in space.[1] [2]
• Elvis Costello joked that every town Berry sang about should get its own statue. He said it in a taped message for the 2011 unveiling of Berry's eight foot statue in University City, Missouri.[1]
• Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis became friends after a fight over who was king of rock and roll. In Hail Hail Rock and Roll, Berry admitted Lewis beat him in the scuffle. Lewis said it started when Berry claimed the crown and he claimed it too.[1]
• Johnnie Johnson was one of the first Black Marines, and was later honored with the Congressional Gold Medal. Johnson served at Montford Point during the Second World War, when the Marine Corps was first integrated, and played in an all serviceman jazz band. The medal came after his death.[1]
• Marc Bolan said T. Rex's hit Get It On grew from his wish to record Berry's Little Queenie. Bolan said the riff came from Berry's song, and a line from Little Queenie is spoken in the fade of Get It On.[1]
• The Beach Boys' Surfin' U.S.A. has been owned by Chuck Berry's publisher since 1963. Murry Wilson signed the copyright, including his son Brian's lyrics, over to Arc Music before the single came out. Later releases credit Berry as writer.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.