Chuck Berry

If you had to pick a single person as the inventor of rock and roll there would be no agreement, because there were many. But the name that comes up most often is Chuck Berry's.

He defined how the rock guitar sounds, how a musician stands on stage, and what the genre talks about.

He died in March 2017, at ninety. And one of his songs is, right now, travelling through interstellar space.

The man who put the puzzle together

Before Chuck Berry the pieces already existed — the blues, country, rhythm and blues, gospel — but nobody had quite put them together.

Between 1955 and 1959, with a burst of songs that are now the foundations of the genre — "Maybellene", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Rock and Roll Music", "Sweet Little Sixteen" and above all "Johnny B. Goode" — he set the mould.

His guitar, with those cutting riffs and those solos that opened each song, became the very sound of rock. Almost every rock guitarist who has ever existed plays, deep down, variations on what he did first.

And he was among the first to write about what really mattered to young people: cars, school, girls, music, teenage freedom. Before that, popular songs were sung by adults for adults.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted him in its inaugural class of 1986, summed it up by saying that after Elvis nobody influenced the shaping of rock and roll more, and that he laid the groundwork not just for a sound but for an attitude.

Mick Jagger, saying goodbye to him, put it simply: he lit up our teenage years and brought our dreams of being musicians to life.

The song that went into space

In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager probes into deep space, on a one-way journey.

On board they put a golden record, the Golden Record: a time capsule of sounds and images from Earth, designed so that if some civilisation found it millions of years from now it would know who we were.

On that record there is music carefully chosen to represent the species: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, traditions from half the world, the blues of Blind Willie Johnson, the jazz of Louis Armstrong.

And a single rock and roll song. One.

It is "Johnny B. Goode", by Chuck Berry.

It did not get there without a fight. Alan Lomax, who sat on the committee that chose the music, objected to having any rock at all: he thought it was adolescent. Carl Sagan told him there are a lot of adolescents on this planet.

Today, while you read this, that guitar is travelling further than anything human beings have ever sent. When the time came to choose the rock that would represent us before the universe, his was chosen.

The duck walk

Berry did not only invent a sound. He also invented a way of being on stage.

His most famous move, the duck walk — advancing in a crouch, on his haunches, while he played — became one of rock's iconic gestures.

The origin, according to him, was almost silly. As a child he moved like that, crouched with his knees bent but his back and head upright, to retrieve a ball from under a table, and his family found it funny.

He brought it back on stage in 1956, at his first show in New York, at the Brooklyn Paramount. His explanation was dry: he had nothing else to do during the instrumental section, he did it, and the applause came.

It was a journalist who christened it the duck walk. And Berry understood, before almost anyone, that rock was not only music: it was also body, attitude, spectacle.

The shadows

Chuck Berry's life was neither simple nor free of shadows, and Rebobinados does not hide them or blur them.

As a young man, in 1944, still a schoolboy, he robbed three shops in Kansas City and stole a car at gunpoint. He served his sentence in a reformatory and was released on the day he turned twenty-one.

The most serious came later, when he was already a star. He met her in a bar in Ciudad Juárez, in December 1959: Janice Escalanti was fourteen, and they travelled together for a week across five states to St. Louis, where she worked about ten days as a hat-check attendant at his club.

On 23 December he was charged under the Mann Act, with transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes. The March 1960 conviction — five years and five thousand dollars — was overturned on appeal that October because of the judge's racist remarks. In the second trial, in 1961, he was convicted again, and served a year and a half in prison until October 1963.

In 1979 he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and served one hundred and twenty days.

And in December 1989 a former cook at the Southern Air, his restaurant in Wentzville, sued him for installing a hidden camera in the women's bathroom. Her name was Hosana Huck. Behind her, as many as sixty plaintiffs joined a class action, settled in 1994 for a figure his biographer Bruce Pegg puts at over 1.2 million dollars plus costs.

The July 1990 raid came out of that investigation, and it was at his house, not the restaurant: officers found tapes and 62 grams of marijuana. On the criminal side he pleaded guilty only to the marijuana misdemeanour — six months suspended, two years' probation, five thousand dollars in a donation.

He was a man with enormous lights and dark areas, difficult, at times embittered by how the industry treated the Black pioneers of rock while enriching those who came afterwards by copying them.

He had specific reasons. "Maybellene" is an adaptation of "Ida Red", and Chess put two co-writers on the record who had not written a note: the disc jockey Alan Freed, in exchange for playing it, and Russ Fratto, who had lent the label money.

Berry fought for decades to get them off. They were not removed until 1986, when he was finally left as the sole author.

His musical greatness can be acknowledged without idealising him as a person. The two things coexist in his story, and it is not right to tell only one.

What to remember

Chuck Berry is proof that sometimes a single person can change the whole course of culture.

Put on "Johnny B. Goode", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Maybellene" or "Sweet Little Sixteen", and you will hear the starting point of everything: the sound, the riffs, the lyrics and the attitude that the whole of rock and roll came out of.

His contribution is beyond question: he put the pieces together, he gave rock its language, and he did it as a Black musician at a time that set everything against him.

And when humanity had to choose one rock song to send to the stars, it did not hesitate.

Chuck Berry taught the Earth to play rock, and now he is teaching the universe.

---

Sources

Chuck Berry, full name Charles Edward Anderson Berry (St. Louis, Missouri, 18 October 1926 – near Wentzville, Missouri, 18 March 2017), American singer, songwriter and guitarist, a founding figure of rock and roll; he died at 90 of cardiac arrest. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957), "Sweet Little Sixteen" (1958) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958) he defined the guitar sound, the subject matter and the stagecraft of the genre. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its inaugural class of 1986, inducted by Keith Richards; the museum's entry notes that after Elvis Presley nobody influenced the shaping and development of rock and roll more and that he laid the groundwork not just for a sound but for an attitude. Mick Jagger, saying goodbye to him, declared that he "lit up our teenage years and brought our dreams of being musicians to life". In 1977 NASA included "Johnny B. Goode" on the Golden Record of the Voyager probes as the only rock and roll song selected; it is worth making precise, against a frequent exaggeration, that the record also contains two other twentieth-century American popular pieces: "Melancholy Blues", by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven, and "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground", by Blind Willie Johnson. His "duck walk" was born of a movement he made as a child to retrieve a ball from under a table and which he brought back on stage in 1956, at the Brooklyn Paramount in New York; it was a journalist who named it that, and Berry explained to the Washington Post that he had nothing else to do during the instrumental section. On his convictions: in 1944, as a schoolboy, he robbed three shops in Kansas City and stole a car at gunpoint, serving his sentence in a reformatory until the day he turned 21; in December 1959 he met Janice Escalanti, aged 14, in a bar in Ciudad Juárez and travelled with her for a week across five states to St. Louis, where she worked about ten days as a hat-check attendant at his club, and on 23 December 1959 he was charged under the Mann Act with transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes, being sentenced in March 1960 to five years and 5,000 dollars in a trial overturned on appeal that October because of the judge's racist remarks, and convicted again in 1961, serving a year and a half in prison until October 1963; in 1979 he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and served 120 days; and in December 1989 a former cook at the Southern Air, his restaurant in Wentzville, Hosana Huck, sued him for installing a hidden camera in the women's bathroom, a class action that came to gather some sixty plaintiffs and was settled in 1994 for a figure his biographer Bruce Pegg puts at over 1.2 million dollars plus costs; the July 1990 raid came out of that investigation and was carried out at his home rather than the restaurant, turning up tapes and 62 grams of marijuana, and on the criminal side he pleaded guilty only to the marijuana possession misdemeanour, with six months suspended, two years' probation and 5,000 dollars in a donation. Elvis Presley has his own profile in this series. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Britannica, Rolling Stone, NASA, rockhall.com, Wikipedia and other coverage.