Many of us have been writers since we were ten because we've been hams in one way or another. We want our times dramatized. We don't want to be erased by time, and I think that's what it's all about. I think everything's a monument, every piece of work we do, to a past. And that's the story. That's the plot.
The Art of Fiction #184 [The Paris Review #172, Winter 2004]
Use the link below to read a 2001 interview with North American novelist BARRY HANNAH:
The death of rock and roll legend Charles Edward Anderson Berry on 18 March 2017 marked the end of a never-to-be-repeated chapter in the history of popular music. Berry's influence was global, as pervasive in its way as that of jazz superstar Louis Armstrong a generation before him.In Berry's case, however, the influence was confined almost exclusively to white musicians, many of whom –– John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards among them –– would go on torecord their own versions of his music in the 1960s, breathing new life into what had become a stalled career and earning him a fortune in royalties in the process.
Berry was born in The Ville, a middle-class black suburb of the Missouri city of St Louis, on 18 October 1926. He was the fourth of six children born to a building contractor (who was also a deacon of his local Baptist church) and a school principal. Music was an important part of Berry's life from an early age and he performed publicly for the first time in 1941 while still a pupil at Sumner High School –– the same segregated black high school later attended by soul singer Tina Turner, jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie and tennis champion Arthur Ashe.
Berry was in his senior year atSumner when he and some friends decided to hold up a bakery, a barber shop and a drygoods store in Kansas City, afterwards stealing a car from its driver at gunpoint in which to make their getaway. He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to three years in reform school, where he remained until1947. Unfortunately, this was not to be his last run-in with the law. In December 1959 he was arrested again for violating the Mann Act –– a law which forbade the transportation of a minor across state lines for immoral purposes –– after hiring a fourteen year old prostitute to work as a hatcheck girl in a restaurant he owned at the time. He was convicted of the offencebut appealed his sentenceon the grounds that the juryhad becomebiasedtoward him as a result of racist comments made by the white judge assigned to hear his case. Berry won his appeal, only to be convicted again in a second trial and sentenced to three years behind bars. He appealed again but this time his conviction was upheld,resulting in him serving eighteen monthsin a Federal penitentiary.
He was briefly jailed for a third time in 1979 after pleading guilty to tax evasion, this time serving a four month sentence in addition to being required to perform 1000 hours of community service in the form of playingbenefit concerts for charitable organizations. He fell afoul of the law again in 1990 after being sued by fifty-nine women who claimed he had videotaped them using therestroom in a restaurant he had recently purchased in the Missouri town of Wentzville. He settled their class action suit out of court but was later charged with drug and child abuse offenses after the police raided his homeand discovered sixty-two grams of marijuana and a videotape showing a minor using the same 'bugged' restroom. He avoided going to jail by pleading guilty to the drug charge, receiving a suspended six month sentence on condition that he donate $5000 to a local hospital.
But all that still lay ahead of him in the 1940s. In October 1948 Berry married Themetta 'Toddy' Suggs, a woman he had known for five months who would remain his spousefor life. Two years later, having become a father for the first time, he began playing guitar in several St Louis pick-up groups, his style primarily influenced by Texas blues musician T-Bone Walker and byhis own friend and local guitar teacher Ira Harris. (His interest in music had not waned during his time in reform school, seeing him form a vocal group which was occasionally granted permission to perform outside the institution.)Berry continued to play in nightclubs and dancehalls, taking day jobs as a housepainter, auto factory worker and janitor to support his growing family, until he was invited to join the trio of popular blues pianist Johnnie Johnson in 1953. (The pianist, who accompanied him on all of his most iconic recordings, unsuccessfully attempted to sue Berry in 2000, claiming that he'd co-written many of his songs without receiving any credit or financial compensation for it.) Johnson's band appealed to both black and white audiences, with the whitesgenerally preferring the country tunes it added to its setsto the blues-based numbers traditionally favored by its blackfans.Berry's ability to combine these two seemingly disparatestyles of music with that of his other major influence,pianist and singer Nat 'King' Cole, proved to be a winning formula. In 1955 he was signed as a solo artistby Chess Records, a Chicago-based blues and R 'n Blabel seeking to expand its roster with artists who could appeal to what had suddenly become the music industry's most important demographic –– whitemiddle-class teenagers withdisposable income to spend on 45rpm records and the portable machines on which to play them.
On 21 May 1955 Berry's first single for the label –– a song calledMaybellenethat had been adapted from the old country chestnutIda Red –– was released, going on to sell in excess of one million copies and becoming an instant classic of the new style of music dubbed 'rock and roll' by pioneering New York City disc jockey Alan Freed. Maybellenebecame the template for much of the music Berry was to record over the next four years –– a period which saw him release a handful of songs, including Johnny B Goode,Roll Over Beethovenand Rock 'n Roll Music, that would make him the most widely imitated rock and rollperformer after Elvis Presley. The resurgence of interest in his music, sparked by popular British Invasion acts like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones who frequently recordedit for both LP and single releases,confirmed his status as the poet laureate of rock and roll, earning him millions of new fans andestablishing him as a key figure of popular culture.
While Berry's talent and influence as a guitarist are generally considered to be seminal, his groundbreaking achievements as a lyricist are sometimes overlooked. His music became instantly popular with white teenagers because it wasrhythmically irresistible and crammed with catchy riffs, frequentlyemploying a traditionally-based 'call and response' melodic line which had been a feature of black music and particularly of the blues since the arrival of the first African slaves in North America in the early eighteenth century. A song like School Days is a perfect example of Berry's unique, rhythm-based method of songwriting, with each sung line being echoed by a corresponding guitar line which mimics it exactly and makes the song virtually impossible to forget after hearing it just once. Berry was also a master when it came to matching syllableswithspecific musical phrases, ensuring that each accent was placed precisely where it needed to be placed to optimize the mnemonic impact of his material. This led to a seamless welding together of language and melody that has seldom been bettered by any songwriter working outside the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway traditions.
Chess Records LP
May 1957
Berry's subject matter was equally well chosen, presenting the listener with an idealized image of North American teenage life that quickly came to be considered synonymous with everything young, cool and modernnot only in the minds of local teenagers but also in those oftheir foreign counterpartsthroughout much of the Western world. So definitivewas his eternally appealingvision of a car and girl-obsessed culture that Brian Wilson was able to recycle it, virtually unaltered,for the emerging white surfculture of the early 1960s, directly basingThe Beach Boys' 1963hitSurfin' USA on the riff of Berry's 1959songBack In The USA. (Berry won several lawsuits against white musicians, among them Wilson and John Lennon, who 'borrowed' his ideas without bothering to acknowledge their creative debt to him or pay him any royalties.)He had a seemingly innate understanding of the tribal phenomenon that rock and roll so rapidly became, penningsong after song thatcelebrated the lifestyles of its anthem craving fans while celebrating the music itself as the eternally defiant antidote to all of life's troubles –– an attitude that persisted into the 1960s and still serves as the self-referencing foundation for much of the music produced by white musicians working in the genres of stadium rock and heavy metal.
It's interesting to note that, of all the tributes that have been paid to Berry since his death, almost none have come from black musicians or, for that matter, from black music fans. The great irony of Berry's success was that it stemmed from his ability to understand and define a culture he was technically barred from entering at even the most fundamental level during the peak of his fame in the latter half of the 1950s. While he could write songs based on what white teenagers were experiencing in their day-to-day lives and perform themtothat same white audience at sold-out concert venues and even inside television studios, segregation meant that he was technically barred from entering their schools or from sitting beside them in restaurants or on various forms of public transport (restrictions, it should be remembered, that were not exclusively confined to openly racist southern states like Alabama and Mississippi but also applied in many northern states). Like his hero Nat 'King' Cole –– another black outsider whose music proved to be exceptionally popular with white middle class audiences ––Berry was accepted into white homes as long as he made no attempt to challenge or rise above his status as a 'harmless negro entertainer.' His arrest and subsequent conviction for having violated the Mann Act made him a dangerous, sexually threatening black man in the eyes of the white establishment, resulting in his music all but vanishingfrom the nation's airwaves until its transatlantic-ledrevival in the early 1960s.
This hypocritical attitude possibly explains Berry's difficult personality and his perpetual distrust of bookers, publicists and even of his fellow musicians. He insisted on being paid in full in cash before he took the stage and was notorious for his refusal to rehearse, expecting the musicians he hired off the cuff to accompany him on his regular club and concert dates to recognize his songs by their opening riffs and already havetheir chord progressions memorized ––behavior that did as little to endear him to diehard fans as his 1970 novelty song My Ding-A-Ling which went on to becomehis only #1 US single and the first#1 song to specifically refer, however coyly, to the act of masturbation.
Whatever else he was, one factremains indisputable: without Chuck Berry, there would be no rock music as it exists today. Along with Elvis Presley and Little Richard, he defined an era andset the standard for everything that followed while managing to create music that will always remain, in the best sense, timeless.
Use the link below to read an article about the controversial life of CHUCK BERRY posted in the online archive of UK newspaper The Sun:
