“Chuck Berry was pure fun,” declares author R.J. Smith, whose recently published Berry bio is subtitled “An American Life.” Just listen to his best numbers and you hear the fun: Ingenious, witty poetics with wry twists and delicious word play, loping and galloping rhythms that make you want to move your hips and maybe shake a tail feather out on the dancefloor, and slices of life right here in the good ol’ USA that captivated young listeners in the 1950s – when youth culture began to set the tone for our society.
His music is exactly what you’d play for a visitor from another planet if they were to inquire, “What’s this stuff you call rock’n’roll?” To wit, his song “Johnny B. Goode” was selected by Carl Sagan to be included on a gold-plated 12-inch record launched billions of miles into space on the Voyager II mission alongside Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and other sound and images that showed the “the great diversity of life on Earth,” as NPR put it.
Berry’s life on this planet reflected the America within which he lived and became a musical legend and cultural symbol, underscoring and bolding the subtitle of Smith’s illuminating book – the good, the bad and the ugly as well as the magic found in the freedom provided by a snazzy car and getting out of school. He spoke to the American teenager at a point when the baby boom was surging about their lives in a lingua franca they could relate to, set to a beat that can’t be beat.
Some say that Berry all but invented rock’n’roll. He was one of the music’s prime progenitors alongside such fellow giants of the genre as Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis and others. And of course Elvis Presley, whose own fusion of R&B and country/folk was the style’s big bang. Berry’s culture bomb was the result of a parallel combustible mix of jump blues with the twang of country and its proletariat expressions of the life. As John Lennon sagaciously observed, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”
Sam Phillips of Sun Records said he wanted to find a White boy who sang like he was Black. Conversely, Berry was thought early on to be White by some DJs and listeners, yet was steeped in the challenges and repressions that characterized African-American life in the eras of his years. The sweet deep dive of Smith’s prodigiously-researched tome brings him and his story and times to compelling and entertaining life.
He parses Berry’s music with the deft and keen skill of a gifted musicologist and lexicologist yet never falls prey to the over-intellectual analysis that can harsh the music’s primal buzz, his descriptions bopping with its spirit. One returns to his classic songs after reading about their creation for a listen that’s delightfully enhanced. As fresh as Berry’s music sounded when he emerged and remains that way whenever you hear it, his biographer’s insights makes listens after reading feel anew, like a revelation.
Smith notes how Berry was “a wonderful bunch of guys,” sometimes in contradictory ways. He was a devoted husband and family man yet also a serial philanderer who did prison time for violating the Mann Act. A canny businessman who also squandered some of the much he earned on whimsical castles in the air. He could be cold and diffident yet also warm and charming when he chose to be so.
Berry was also a libidinal rebel and adventurer a good decade before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, dallying with young white women while touring the still-strictly-segregated 1950s South at risk of being jailed. Yet for all his peccadilloes and offenses to social norms as well as prickly attitudes, Smith proves how much his life was emblematic of a changing America at the time his songs topped the charts and became a potent agent of that change.
Would there have even been a Beatles or Rolling Stones without Chuck Berry? Sure, but they would have sounded a lot different. His musical creation formed a thick and vibrant strand of rock’n’roll’s DNA. I compiled a Spotify playlist – punily titled “Berry Good Covers” – of wonderful takes on his songs by musical talents that followed in his wake that is four hours and 78 songs of pure fun (and when I have the time will likely add at least another hour or two).
The biggest gift of many within this masterful bio is that it impels the reader to spin Berry’s tunes yet again. And revel in how it truly is, to invoke Smith’s observation yet again, pure fun.
Populist Picks
Documentary TV Series: “The Story of the Jews” – At a time when the objectionable actions of Israel stain the reputation of Judaism and heighten already resurgent antisemitism, this five part portrait of a people and their faith is an overview that may not be comprehensive but still fully invokes their soul. Historian Simon Schama’s narration is not just warm and engaging but frequently delivers phrases of poetic beauty.
Documentary TV Series: “The Secrets of Playboy” – The game-changing men’s magazine is thought by some to be a liberating and progressive force. But this show dives beneath the glossy surface to reveal a disturbingly dark and perverted toxic male underbelly suffusing modern manhood icon Hugh Hefner, his magazine and playground mansion.
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2023
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