The Chris Moeller Archives

The Father of Rock-n-Roll

A week from tomorrow, Chuck Berry will be laid to rest. He was a musical icon, a St. Louis icon, and an American icon. Props to Robert Zemeckis' 1985 film Back to the Future for perpetuating the reality that Berry invented rock and roll. Thanks in part to that popular Michael J. Fox vehicle, I hope that it was generally understood by the public, upon Berry's death week before last, that Berry was, indeed, the man most responsible for what rock and roll would eventually become and how we would come to understand it, even as we acknowledge that each of these popular art forms are very fluid in their origination story and possess many parents. If not its inventor, however, Berry was certainly the music's designer and engineer.

Berry's guitar licks gave the genre its power and its electricity. They are on display in such timeless recordings from the mid-1950's to early '60s as "Johnny B. Goode," "No Particular Place to Go," "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," "School Days," and "You Never Can Tell," and it has been cited as the predominant influence on the work of everybody after that is considered to be under the rock and roll umbrella. He also sold the music hard, providing the swagger that became the music's foremost characteristic, and it was a signature of his art as well up until the end. He is "the Father of Rock-n-Roll." In 1977, Berry's recording of "Johnny B. Goode" was chosen for inclusion on the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of vinyl grooves snuggled firmly aboard the Voyager 1 probe and launched into space with the intent of communicating to extraterrestrials the story of  humans on planet Earth.

Also "time capsuled" on the Voyager are interpretations of the work of Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, and a recording by at least one other American, the gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson. During a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch in 1978, a character portrayed by Steve Martin psychically intuited that the aliens had responded to the gift by returning a four-word message "Send more Chuck Berry." According to prominent and respected internet sources, the Voyager Golden Record passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, and left the solar system in 2004. In 2012, the probe was reported by NASA to be 17.9 billion km from the sun, and in 2013-- still capable of sending back data transmissions-- it had left the heliosheath and entered interstellar space. In only about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will come within about 1.8 light-years of the star Gliese 445 in the constellation Camelopardalis. That's a long bus ride from The Ville neighborhood in North St. Louis, where Berry was born in 1926. Due to housing covenants and other legal restrictions, African-Americans in St. Louis were-- and have been-- concentrated in this 0.42 square-mile area for decades, though its borders could not contain the talent and the drive within. Other native sons and daughters of The Ville include Arthur Ashe, Grace Bumbry, Dick Gregory, Sonny Liston, and Josephine Baker.

Until 2014, Chuck Berry still performed one Tuesday night each month in the Duck Room of the Blueberry Hill club on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. I will be in St. Louis on Sunday. His funeral will be a private event that day for friends and family, but the Berrys have scheduled a public viewing for us at the Pageant theater on Delmar from 8 am to noon. Berry also recently completed a record of new music that will be released posthumously.
 

posted by CM @ 2:25 PM