The directory «Plots»
Berry Charles Edward Anderson «Chuck»
(born 1926)
Charles Edward Anderson «Chuck» Berry is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter.
Chuck Berry is an influential figure and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986. He received Kennedy Center Honors in 2000 in a "class" with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Plácido Domingo, Angela Lansbury, and Clint Eastwood. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Chuck Berry #5 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. He was also ranked 6th on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA Berry was the third child in a family of six. He grew up in the north St. Louis neighborhood known as "The Ville", an area where many middle class St. Louis blacks lived at the time. His father was a contractor and a deacon of a nearby Baptist church, his mother a qualified principal. His middle class upbringing allowed him to pursue his interest in music from an early age and he made his first public performance while still at Sumner High School.
In 1944, before he could graduate, he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery after taking a joy ride with his friends to Kansas City, Missouri. In his 1987 autobiography, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, he retells the story that his car broke down on the side of a highway and, not having a way home, flagged down a passing car. Berry attempted to commandeer the man's car at gunpoint with a non functional pistol. The carjacked man called the police from a nearby pay phone who quickly pulled over Berry in the car and arrested him and his friends. Berry was released from the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, near Jefferson City, Missouri on his 21st birthday in 1947.
Chuck Berry had been playing the blues since his teens and according to the 1987 Taylor Hackford film "Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll,", and used both guitar riffs and grandstanding done earlier by jump blues player T. Bone Walker. By early 1953 Berry was performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio, a band that played at a popular club called The Cosmopolitan, in East St. Louis, Illinois and whose namesake would become Berry's long-time collaborator. Although the band played mostly blues and ballads, the most popular music among whites in the area was hillbilly. Berry wrote, "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."
In May 1955, Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Waters himself, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Berry thought his blues material would be of most interest to Chess, but to his surprise it was an old country and western recording by Bob Wills, entitled "Ida Red" that got Chess's attention. In recent years, Chess had seen the blues market shrink and was looking to move beyond the rhythm and blues market, and he thought Berry might be that artist who could do it. So on May 21, 1955 Berry covered "Ida Red" (renamed "Maybellene") with Johnny Johnson, Jerome Green (from Bo Diddley's band) on the maracas, Jasper Thomas on the drums and blues legend Willie Dixon on the bass. "Maybellene" sold over a million copies, reaching #1 on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart and #5 on the Hot 100.
At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart.
In 1956 Berry toured as one of the "Top Acts of '56". He and Carl Perkins became friends. Perkins said that "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." As they toured, Perkins discovered that Berry not only liked country music, but knew about as many songs, and Jimmie Rodgers was one of his favorites. "Chuck knew every Blue Yodel", and most of Bill Monroe's songs as well. Perkins remembered, "He told me about how he was raised very poor, very tough. He had a hard life. He was a good guy. I really liked him."
In the autumn of 1957 Berry joined the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and other rising stars of the new rock and roll to tour the United States. The hits continued from 1957 to 1959, with Berry scoring over a dozen chart singles during this period, including the top 10 U.S. hits "School Days," "Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode." Author/producer Robert Palmer wrote that Berry’s songs tended to feature country and western inflected light blues melodies, along with plenty of guitar twang. He also had a taste for the "Spanish tinge", as in "La Juanda" and "Havana Moon".
By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name, as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand.
But in December 1959, Berry encountered legal problems after he invited a 14-year-old Apache waitress whom he met in Mexico to work as a hat check girl at his club. After being fired from the club, the girl was arrested on a prostitution charge and Berry was arrested under the Mann Act. After a trial and retrial, Berry was convicted, fined $5,000, and sentenced to five years in prison. This event, coupled with other early rock and roll scandals such as Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to his 13-year-old cousin and Alan Freed's payola conviction, gave rock and roll an image problem that limited its acceptance into mainstream U.S. society.
When Berry was released from prison in 1963, his musical career enjoyed a resurgence due to many of the British invasion acts of the 1960s — most notably the Beatles and the Rolling Stones — releasing cover versions of Berry's songs. Additionally, The Beach Boys' hit "Surfin' USA", while originally credited as composed by Brian Wilson, is in large part a direct copy of Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen". Berry has since been given full writer credit (both lyrics and music) on the track.
In 1964–65 Berry resumed recording and placed six singles in the U.S. Hot 100, including "No Particular Place To Go" (#10), "You Never Can Tell" (#14), and "Nadine" (#23).
Berry's second tenure with Chess ended with the 1973 album Bio, after which he did not make a studio record for 6 years.
Berry's type of touring circuit in the 1970s — where he was often paid in cash by local promoters — added ammunition to the Internal Revenue Service's accusations that Berry was a chronic income tax evader. Facing criminal sanction for the third time, Berry pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to four months imprisonment and 1,000 hours of community service — doing benefit concerts — in 1979.
At the request of Jimmy Carter, Chuck Berry performed at The White House on June 1, 1979. Also in 1979, Berry released Rockit for Atco Records, his last studio album to date.
Berry continued to play 70 to 100 one-nighters per year in the 1980s, still travelling solo and requiring a local band to back him at each stop.
In the late 1980s, Berry owned a restaurant in Wentzville, Missouri, called The Southern Air. He also owns a custom built estate in Wentzville, which he dubbed Berry Park. For many years, Berry hosted rock concerts throughout the summer at Berry Park. However, he eventually closed the estate to the public due to the riotous behaviour of many of the guests.
In 1990 Berry was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies' bathrooms at two of his St. Louis restaurants. A class action settlement was eventually reached with 59 women on the complaint. Berry's biographer, Bruce Pegg, estimated that it cost Berry over $1.2 million plus legal fees. It was during this time that he began using Wayne T. Schoeneberg as his legal counsel.
In November 2000, Berry was sued by his former pianist Johnnie Johnson, who claimed that he co-wrote over 50 songs, including "No Particular Place to Go", "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Roll Over Beethoven", that credit Berry alone. The case was dismissed when the judge ruled that too much time had passed since the songs were written.
Gambia, 1995, Chuck Berry
Tanzania, 1995, Chuck Berry
