Recommendations of the Editorial team
Chuck Berry not only invented the rock’n’roll guitar-he perfected it. This can be heard in the intro of his classic “Johnny B. Goode” from 1956 when he initiates the song with an 18-second manifesto on the six-sailing-the final hymn of the guitar hero. He knew how to mix the blues and the country music he loved by mingling boogie-woogie and Hillbilly-Twang into his own original style of the electrical high-speed flash. In other words: rock & roll. Every tradition of American music is contained somewhere in Chuck Berry’s guitar. As his student Keith Richards said, “Chuck is the grandfather of all of us”.
He was a hairdresser from St. Louis when he recorded his revolutionary debut hit “Maybellene” for Chess Records in 1955. He always said he wrote “Maybellene” to copy a country classic, Bob Wills’ “Ida Red”. But Chuck Berry created something new that set the world on fire. He defined the rock & roll with a flood of ingenious hits: “Roll Over Beethoven”, “You Can’t Catch Me”, “Little Queenie”, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”.
The Beatles and the Stones, Hendrix and Zeppelin, the Velvets and the Clash emerged from his riffs. In the early 1960s, Berry was put into prison, where he wrote the bitterly Ironic “Celebrity Land”. But in the Woodstock era he celebrated his new hippie fan base with the great stoner choogle “Tulane” from 1970.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” emphasized Chuck Berry in 1987 in the film “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ roll ”. He said about his guitar game: “It is just a washboard of the long time”. There cannot be a more poetic summary of Chuck Berry’s achievements.
Key Tracks: “Maybellene”, “Johnny B. Goode”, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”.