Chuck Berry Biography, Photos and Posters

Chuck Berry

Biography

Born: October 18, 1926
City and Country of Origin: St. Louis, Missouri
Music Training:
Awards: 1986 inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; 2000 received Kennedy Center Honors
Top Recordings: "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," "School Days," "Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Johnny B. Goode," "Carol," "Run Rudolph Run," "Back In The USA," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Nadine (Is It You?)," "No Particular Place To Go," "My Ding-A-Ling," "Reelin' and Rockin'"
Chuck Berry Biography: Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, 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'."

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. And in 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Chuck Berry number 5 on their list of The Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Born October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri (although some biographies establish San Jose, California as his birthplace), Berry was the third child in a family of six. He grew up in an area of St. Louis known as the Ville, one of the few areas of the city where black people could own property, which consequently made it synonymous with black prosperity. His father was a contractor and a deacon of a nearby Baptist church, his mother a qualified principal. His middle-class upbringing allowed him to pursue his interest in music from an early age and he made his first public performance while still in high school.

In 1944, before he could graduate, he was arrested and convicted for attempted burglary after taking a joy ride with his friends to Kansas City, Missouri.

In his 1987 autobiography Chuck Berry: The Autobiography he retells the story that his car broke down on the side of a highway and, not having a way home, he flagged down a passing car and when he got in he pulled the muzzle of a gun out of his coat (it wasn't a working gun—just the slide with no handle) and told the man to get out. The man went to a nearby pay phone and called the police who quickly pulled over Berry in the car and arrested him and his friends.

Chuck Berry had been playing the blues since his teens and by early 1953 was performing with Sir John's Trio, a band that played at a popular club called The Cosmopolitan, in East St. Louis, Illinois. The group included 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. 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, Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Muddy Waters who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Signed to a recording contract, that summer he released a unique version of the traditional fiddle tune "Ida Red" under the title "Maybellene". The song, which featured a new set of modern lyrics and a driving beat, eventually peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Best Sellers In Stores chart, despite being banned on many radio stations. At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached number 29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. Berry's early LP records sometimes contained well-delivered blues standards to round out the customary dozen tracks. In the autumn of 1957 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 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". Robert Palmer wrote that Chuck Berry’s songs tended to feature country-and-western inflected light blues melodies, along with plenty of guitar twang. He also had a taste for the "Spanish tinge," as in "La Juanda" and "Havana Moon."

Berry appeared in two early rock 'n' roll movies. The first was Rock Rock Rock released in 1956. He is shown singing "You Can't Catch Me." He had a speaking role as himself in the 1959 film Go, Johnny, Go! along with Alan Freed, and also shown performing his songs "Johnny B. Goode," "Memphis, Tennessee," and "Little Queenie."

During the early days of his music career scandal followed Berry everywhere he went. In December 1959, after scoring a string of hit songs and while touring often, Berry had legal problems after he invited a 14-year-old Apache waitress that 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 Berry was arrested under the Mann Act. Berry was convicted, fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. This event, coupled with other early rock and roll scandals—such as Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to his 13-year-old cousin and Alan Freed's payola conviction—gave rock and roll an image problem that limited its acceptance into mainstream U.S. society. However, when 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 classic Berry hits. In 1964–65 Berry resumed recording and placed 6 singles in the U.S. Hot 100, including "No Particular Place To Go" (number 10), "You Never Can Tell" (number 14), and "Nadine" (number 23).

In 1990 Berry was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies' bathrooms at two of his St. Louis restaurants. A class action settlement was eventually reached with 59 women on the complaint. Berry's biographer, Bruce Pegg, estimated that it cost Berry over $1.2 million plus legal fees.

In 1966 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 during the Mercury era. He returned to Chess from 1970 to 1975. He 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". Despite its lightweight nature it is, infamously, Berry's only No. 1 single, ever, 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 Berry's final top-40 hit in both the U.S. and the UK.

In the 1970s Berry toured on the basis of his earlier successes. He was on the road for many years, carrying only his Gibson guitar, confident that he could hire a band that already knew his music no matter where he went.

This type of touring style, traveling the "oldies" circuit in the 1970s—where he was often paid in cash by local promoters—added ammunition to the Internal Revenue Service's indictment that Berry was a chronic income tax evader. The third time that Chuck Berry would face criminal sanction was after pleading guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to four months imprisonment and 1,000 hours of community service—doing benefit concerts—in 1979.

At the request of Jimmy Carter, Chuck Berry performed at The White House on June 1, 1979. That same year, Berry released Rockit for Atco Records, his last studio album to date.

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

One of the highlights in the film version was a historic exchange between Keith Richards and Chuck Berry on how to set an amplifier for a guitar. Image Entertainment released a new version of the film in June 2006, which contains the original movie and bonus material such as rehearsals and documentaries.

Berry continues to perform regularly, playing both throughout the United States and overseas. He performs one Wednesday each month at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and bar located in the Delmar Loop neighbourhood in St. Louis.

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