Chuck Berry: "King of Rock & Roll"

One of the enduring legends of rock & roll, and its single most influential figure. Born Charles Edward Berry in St. Louis, Missouri, October 18, 1931, he learned guitar while in teens, though the halcyon calm of his adolescent years was shattered by a three-year spell in reform school for attempted robbery. Returned home in 1947 and worked for time for General Motors, before taking up career in hairdressing. Took increasing interest in music, partly to supplement his income and support a wife and two children. In 1955 he moved to Chicago, and his career took off after he'd persuaded Muddy Waters to let him sit in on a session. Waters was highly impressed with his guitar technique and fluent style, so he recommended Berry to Leonard Chess, head of Chess Records, who signed up many local black acts. Berry was offered a contract, and recorded his first tracks, Maybellene and Wee Wee Hours. For the next four years, Berry went on to produce a stream of utterly incomparable, archetypal rock & roll songs, among which were "Roll Over Beethoven", "Johnny B. Goode", "Sweet Little Sixteen", and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man".

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His sources were those of rock & roll itself-- a blend of R&B and C&W (he had listened to country music on radio at home in St. Louis), although he had also acquired an appreciation of blues (obviously, since he was working in Chicago). In contrast to other early rockers, he concentrated on clarity of diction, so that his witty and often acerbic lyrics could be plainly heard--indeed, he was responsible for introducing a disciplined lyricism to early rock music.

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He also notched up appearances in four films at this time-- "Rock Rock Rock", "Mr. Rock and Roll", "Go Johnny Go", and "Jazz On A Summer's Day"-- the latter a film of the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, where he sang "Sweet Little Sixteen" and demonstrated his famous duck-walk, which he had developed in 1956 and which virtually completed the Berry charisma. He was one of the few black performers getting across to a largely white teenage audience and his popularity was enormous.

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The early 1960's featured another amazing string of hits that included "Memphis Tennessee", "Nadine", "No Paricular Place To Go", and "You Never Can Tell". A U.K. appearance at the Lanchester Arts Festival in 1972 not only gave him one-half of a double album, "London Sessions", but also, strangely, his biggest-ever chart success. The gently ribald "My Ding-A-Ling" was his first ever No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic. Strangely, because the song had been in and out of his stage show since he first turned professional.

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Berry is now a rich man, and can afford to live in style and comfort. Despite the occasionally shoddy form that his hardened professionalism takes, there is no doubt that his contribution to the history of rock music has been unique and an inspriration to generations of guitarists to follow.