Chuck Berry

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Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926 in Overland, Missouri) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter.

Chuck Berry is an immensely influential figure, and one of the pioneers of rock & roll music. Cub Koda wrote, "Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers." John Lennon was more succinct: "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."

Chuck 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 Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. He was also ranked 6th on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Chuck Berry had been playing the blues since his teens and by early 1953 was (according to the 1987 Taylor Hackford film "Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll") performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio, a band that played at a popular club called The Cosmopolitan, in East St. Louis, Illinois. The group included Chuck Berry's long-time collaborator and the group's namesake, piano man, Johnnie Johnson. Although the band played mostly blues and ballads, the most popular music among whites in the area was hillbilly. Chuck 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, Chuck Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Waters himself, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Chuck Berry thought his blues material would be of most interest to Chess, but to his surprise it was the hillbilly "Ida Red" that got Chess' attention. Chess in recent years had seen its market shrink and was looking to move beyond the rhythm and blues market and Chess thought Berry might be that artist that could do it. So on May 21, 1955 Chuck Berry recorded, "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" reached the pop charts and #1 on the rhythm and blues charts.

At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. Chuck Berry's early LP records sometimes contained well-delivered blues standards to round out the customary dozen tracks. In the autumn of 1957 Chuck 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 Chuck 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". 

In December 1959, after scoring a string of hit songs and while touring often, Chuck Berry had legal problems after he invited a 14-year-old Apache waitress whom he met in Mexico to work as a hat check girl at Berry's Club Bandstand, his nightclub in St. Louis. After being fired from the club, the girl was arrested on a prostitution charge and Chuck Berry was arrested under the Mann Act. Chuck Berry was convicted, fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. However, when Chuck 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 Chuck Berry's songs. In 1964–65 Chuck 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).

In 1966 Chuck Berry left Chess Records, moving to the Mercury label. For a variety of reasons—including changing musical tastes and different production techniques—the hits dried up for Chuck Berry during the Mercury era. Chuck Berry returned to Chess from 1970 to 1975.

Chuck Berry did release a hit single, in 1972, for Chess — a live recording of a song he had initially recorded years earlier as a novelty track "My Ding-a-Ling". This song is Chuck Berry's only No. 1 single, and it remains popular today. A live recording of "Reelin' And Rockin'" was also issued as a follow-up single that same year and would prove to be Chuck Berry's final top-40 hit in both the U.S. and the UK.

In 1986, Taylor Hackford made a documentary film, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, of a celebration concert for Chuck Berry's sixtieth birthday. Keith Richards was the musical leader. Eric Clapton, Etta James, Robert Cray and Linda Ronstadt, among others, appeared with Chuck Berry on stage and film. During the concert, Chuck Berry played a Gibson ES-355, the luxury version of the Gibson ES-335. Richards played a black Fender Custom Telecaster, Cray a Fender Stratocaster and Clapton a Gibson ES 350T, the same guitar Chuck Berry used on his early recordings.

Angus Young, of AC/DC, who has cited Chuck Berry as one of his biggest influences, is famous for using Chuck Berry's duckwalk as one of his gimmicks.


Chuck Berry's famous duckwalk, often used by Angus Young of AC/DC and many other rock guitarists. Chuck Berry was also a large influence on such second generation rockers as The Who and Bob Dylan. The Beach Boys' hit "Surfin' USA" resembled Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" so closely that they were forced to give Chuck Berry a co-writing credit in order to avoid a lawsuit. In the 1980s, George Thorogood created a reasonable career out of what was essentially a Chuck Berry tribute show. Covering a number of Chuck Berry songs and appropriating the duckwalk, Thorogood toured relentlessly as a high-energy, rock and roll revival act.

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