Scroll through your phone, or walk into a bar pretty much anywhere in the world that has a TV on, and you’ll see the news flashing across the screen: Chuck Berry, the “father of rock ‘n’ roll,” has died at the age of 90. It seems there were many who didn’t want to believe the news—Snopes.com eventually posted a link to the St. Charles County Police Department’s official confirmation.
Even though Berry was 90, the news was a shock; there were a lot of us who thought he would be around forever. After all, it was only last October that Berry announced, on his 90th birthday, that he had a new album in the works, simply titled Chuck. (He dedicated it to his wife of 68 years, Themetta, who survives him, along with his four children.) His last record was 1979’s Rock It, released two years after his music was launched into outer space, grooved into the surface of Voyager‘s Golden Record.
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Chuck will pull together new songs, as well as some dating as far back as the Rock It era. It “was recorded in various studios around St. Louis,” noted a press release, “and features Berry’s longtime hometown backing group—including his children Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (harmonica), plus Jimmy Marsala (Berry’s bassist of forty years), Robert Lohr (piano), and Keith Robinson (drums)—which has supported him for over two decades on over 200 residency shows at the famed Blueberry Hill club.”
That’s kind of an amazing paragraph, if you think about it, because it describes how active and present Berry was here in St. Louis.
Even though his fanbase included people like Bob Dylan and Keith Richards, Berry was generous, gracious, and open to fans in his hometown. When we put him on the cover of our “100 Greatest Musicians” issue, in April 2012, we threw the party at Blueberry Hill. Berry made a surprise appearance, playing with St. Louis blues prodigy Marquise Knox, chatting with folks, and signing magazines.
See also: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘N’ Roll—And Chuck Berry, Too
And St. Louis loved him back. He easily won SLM‘s readers’ poll of the best St. Louis musicians of all time. Fans have already started to converge on University City to pay tribute, and Harry Weber’s statue of Berry will surely have all kinds of ephemera stacked around it in the coming weeks. Those same fans will be waiting, anxiously, for updates about that new record.
There might also finally be more energy (and funding?) to help restore Berry’s childhood home. As Chris Naffziger wrote of that house, The Greater Ville was built in a horseshoe shape, and there was a reason for that: “As is often the case, race explains the strange lacuna; The Ville was made up of African-American, largely middle-class residents living in old wood frame shotguns dating back to the neighborhood’s former life as a rural village, Elleardsville. The Greater Ville was white, and middle-class. For Berry to break through that invisible boundary into the Greater Ville was a big deal. In that bungalow, history was made, changing music forever. ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and ‘Rock and Roll Music’ are just two of the dozens of revolutionary songs written within the confines of this small brick house. Over the course of the 1950s, from his home base at 3137 Whittier Street, Berry would spread rock ‘n’ roll around the United States. Before long, artists such as the Rolling Stones and The Beatles would cover his songs on their first albums, further spreading his influence to a world audience.”
Many of Berry’s songs—”Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” for instance—slyly circumvented the racist attitudes that predominated in 1950s America. And whether he planned it that way, his music, or at least rock ‘n’ roll, became a powerful force for social change. As CNN noted in its tribute, Berry wrote on his website that black and white musicians “jived between each other. All were artists, playing foolish, having fights and making love as if the rest of the world had no racial problems whatsoever.” And rock ‘n’ roll concerts attracted both black and white audiences, which was a huge sea change.
See also: A Conversation with Chuck Berry
In Bill Wyman’s excellent New York Magazine piece from last December, “Chuck Berry Invented the Idea of Rock and Roll,” Wyman acknowledges that there have been debates on the whole subject of who invented rock ‘n’ roll. People are still arguing today whether it was Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, or another St. Louis guy, Ike Turner. But, Wyman says, all arrows eventually point back to Berry. “He knew the blues, and he knew country, and he was there when rock started,” he wrote. “Of the original people who were there when rock was formed, he’s the only one who not only wrote most of his own material, but wrote substantive material. He was writerly. He filled his songs with meanings and subtexts that resonate still today by means of a somewhat jokey but always intent poesy.
“And with those talents he added one thing to rock and roll it didn’t have before, and this thing he added might well be the thing that makes us talk about it, still today,” Wyman continued. “With grace and wit, his lyrics reflected back on themselves a world flawed but full of potential, and somehow made more joyous and meaningful when matched to the implications of the music he was playing. His great contribution was not to invent rock and roll, but invent the idea of rock and roll: that with the verities of truth, imagination, and a backbeat, it held secrets, and promises.”
In Berry’s hands, Wyman wrote, “rock became something mythopoeic, and for a not-insignificant number of years, this exalted perception of itself reigned. Most of the significant artists of the last half-century or more didn’t just make rock and roll records; they made records that in one way or another hinted at something bigger. It was something Chuck Berry told them they could do.”
And that’s something that’s still happening. When musician M. Ward visited Blueberry Hill last summer, he crafted the show around Chuck Berry songs, proclaiming himself a “huge devotee.”
Joe Edwards and Blueberry Hill’s famous Duck Room spoiled us rotten. We could go see Berry play once a month until fairly recently. In retrospect, that seems surreal, especially as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and Brian Wilson pay tribute to Berry. It was almost like being able to walk down the street to see Beethoven play (if Berry hadn’t already told him to roll over and get out of the way). And Berry’s presence here was genuine.
See also: “Joe Edwards: ‘The Chuck Berry I Knew’”
“He loved St. Louis,” Berry’s son, Charles E. Berry Jr., told SLM in 2012. “That’s the reason he’s stayed here, almost 85 years. This was always home, and always will be. Yeah, my dad’s a rock ’n’ roller; his life was extremely fast-paced. He had a house out in L.A. for almost 25 years; he’d go out to do what he had to do. But there is just something about St. Louis, as goofed up as it is, that kept him coming back. I won’t say we’re Sleepy Hollow, but the hustle-bustle factor is greatly reduced here. I toured with him a lot, and he’d always say, ‘Boy, I’m so glad to be back.’ He never wore red slippers, but I can just see him clickin’ his heels and sayin’, ‘There’s no place like home.’”
Image via Flickr
