Chuck Berry, a singer and pioneer of the rock and roll genre, described rock and roll as “a mixture of a lot of music, like bluegrass. It fades into this and fades into that. Most people's impressions overlap other people's impressions, and music is like that, too.”[1] Berry rose to fame in the 1950s, a transformative decade in the civil rights era, especially in relation to racial divisions in music in the United States. Among Berry’s influences were Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, artists known for performing rhythm and blues, a popular genre among African-American audiences in the fifties [2]. At the time, a country and western musical genre known as hillbilly was popular among White audiences. The synthesis of rhythm & blues and country & western in Berry’s music into the rock and roll genre reflects the the rise in social and cultural integration among the younger generation of Americans, yet discrimination and segregation in music persisted.
Berry hailed from St. Louis, Missouri, where whites listened to country and western music, also known as hillbilly, while blacks mostly listened to blues music. Race typically dictated the music an artist was supposed to produce, but Berry set a precedent he didn’t restrict himself to one audience or genre from the start of his career. He incorporated country and hillbilly into his music, which introduced hillbilly music to black audiences. When Berry preformed at The Cosmopolitan Club in St. Louis in 1953, he said the Cosmo’s predominantly black audience, “laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed trying to dance to it.”[3] Since hillbilly was already popular among whites in Missouri, this attracted white youth to the Cosmo despite the segregation norm at public places. Consequently, nearly half of the club’s audience where Berry performed was white.[4] In the segregated society, music was also separated by racial identities. Berry’s fusion of the two genres arguably created common ground for black and white American youth, and laid the foundation for rock and roll music and black artists to cross racial boundaries into mainstream pop culture.
Berry sang many songs about the perils of adolescence, an issue that touched both black and white youth in America. “School Days” from his first album After School Sessions released in 1957, contains lyrics directing the listener to “Drop the coin right into the slot. You gotta hear something that's really hot.” Berry was speaking directly to a segment of the population, the white suburban youth who bought their own records, that as a black musician, he wasn’t expected to be able to connect with. Berry was tapping into the rebellious nature of the youth, redirecting them from the mundane nature of school to more exciting music. The fact that he was a black artist also added to the rebellious nature of his records, which would have been disapproved of by white parents. Rock and roll music appealed to a younger generation that was growing up with the civil rights movement and school desegregation. Since After School Sessions centered around the universal theme of adolescence, Berry was able to appeal to a young white audience without alienating his black audience.
Although Berry faced the same restrictions as other black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley to get his music recorded and distributed to an audience of a different race, his music was able to transcend the boundaries placed by record labels and white radio stations. This reflects a change in white society’s perception of black artists and their increasing influence on the lives of the new generation of white Americans. This experience can be similarly applied to concerts and tours, where Berry’s audience was increasingly white. In the segregated South, touring and meeting audiences gave Berry the chance to interact more with his Southern white audiences. There became a shift between teenagers and their parents’ generation, they were no longer confined to listening to white artists despite radio restrictions because they could buy their own records. This led to more exposure for black artists among young people and Berry’s music became an outlet for youthful rebellion, which came to be associated with rock and roll.
Another explanation for his songs being about the perils of youth is because that’s when he was facing relatable issues to other Americans. Berry did not experience the same racism from common people when he got older since he became a popular singer. The contrast in his treatment by whites when they saw him as a black man and as a famous singer shows the perception of blacks by white society during this time. Berry coined the term “Hospitaboo”, a portmanteau of hospitality and taboo, which he described as “those people who speak to you and don't even know you — yet they didn't speak to me when I was growing up, because I was black.”[5] White audiences were listening to and watching prominent African Americans, who were able to reach great success and wealth while regular African Americans were still discriminated against by that same society. This contradicting attitude was highly prevalent during the civil rights era and was embodied in Chuck Berry’s outspokenness about his own experiences.
Chuck Berry’s lyrics also show a level of sophistication that raised the standards of lyrics in rock and roll music. Berry shed light on the thought process behind his lyrics, they “came from actual poetry. Poetry portrays a scene or a story, and that’s the way my lyrics were originally from some thought, from it came a story and then proceeded with a music or some riff that reminded me of the situation that brought about a story. It didn’t come from music, it come from lyrics.”[6] Berry impacted the role of songwriting in rock and roll music because his songs were known for intelligent lyrics in contrast to other artists of the day. Additionally, Berry’s sophisticated lyricism, when seen in a racial context, contrasts the views and expectations of African-American artistic and intellectual capabilities in white society. Education was segregated when Berry was growing up and like most African Americans, he did not get the opportunity to pursue a level of education afforded to white Americans. It should be mentioned that Berry did attend college, but it was for hairdressing, unrelated to the poetry and literature he was well-versed in that he infused into his song-making process. It is difficult to determine to what extent the perception of blacks in education changed throughout this era, coinciding with Southern schools gradually desegregating during the 50s. But there is evidence Berry became in demand for his songs by white artists and labels, for example, Elvis Presley’s record attempted to get Berry to write songs for Presley[7]. Berry’s success and praise for his lyrics, in particular, show that despite the limitations placed on his African-American education and discrimination as a youth, he was able to push the boundaries of rock and roll songwriting.
However, Berry did face challenges as a black musician getting his songs played on the mainstream radio, which reflects how segregation in the U.S. extended to radio play and record labels. There were separate record labels for each race under the same record company, such as RCA Victor for whites and Camden for blacks. Bo Diddley explained his experience with radio: “I remember hearing Phil Chess, this guy said “you know what, if we could get a white kid to play this song, we could get it played,” because radio stations were all Caucasians. They wouldn’t play black music, so they said okay, so all of a sudden you got Carl Perkins popped up, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent...they all come out of with their records... they were playing rockabilly. All of a sudden we became a no/no. What is this? This is devil music.”[8] Songs by black artists were covered by white singers and played on the mainstream radio for white audiences. A consequence of this is although they were essentially the same songs, the white artists were labeled rock and roll, while Berry was initially confined to the rhythm and blues genre. The appropriation of this genre by white artists made it more difficult for Berry initially to get recognized as a legitimate rock and roll artist. However his hit single “Maybellene” was based on a traditional country song called “Ida Red”. By incorporating traditional white country music into his songs, Berry didn’t confine himself to this racial categorization. “Maybellene” was quite groundbreaking because it was sung by a black artist and was recognized as a Chuck Berry song by the mass audience.
Berry’s mannerisms and stage performance also lend themselves to racial commentary. In comparison to other rock and roll artists, Berry was independent and took his career in his own hands instead of being controlled by industry figures such as Elvis Presley’s manager Tom Parker or record producers like Sam Philipps. Taylor Hackford, director of Hail!Hail!Rock’N’Roll, a documentary on Chuck Berry’s 60th Birthday Concert, wrote of “the huge world of white culture and intellectualism that Chuck craved in his heart but had no way of accessing. It was like a big “keep out” sign, saying “uneducated blacks need not apply,” against which he was hurling himself.”[9] With this mentality in mind, we can see how Chuck Berry was affected by his awareness of being a black artist. This led to his persistent efforts to get educated, he went to business school, took accounting classes, invested in real estate, and managed his own finances. Berry was a very enterprising man, even handling his own performance payments. This could have resulted from Berry’s own experience working with his father as a young man, blacks were paid less than whites and had fewer opportunities for work in general while Berry was growing up.
One could argue Berry’s eloquence and determination to sound as educated or intellectual as possible rose from his struggle to make sense of his black identity. There is evidence from comments made by those who worked with him on Hail!Hail!Rock’n’Roll. Keith Richards’ manager Jane Rose said during the documentary’s pre-production that Berry “was so articulate, and he didn’t even speak like a black man. His accent was very white and homogenized.”[10] He channeled this frustration into his pattern of speech, not only talking but singing. When Berry performed “Maybellene”, he “put everything I had into it; a hillbilly stomp, the chicken peck, and even ad-libbed some southern country dialect.”[11] The incorporation of white pronunciation could have contributed to Berry’s appeal to white audiences, it also differentiated rock and roll from pure rhythm and blues because of less influence from the southern black vernacular while not being fully country or western musically. Berry’s identity crisis reflects the social expectations of different races, black people were perceived to be less educated by whites and were discriminated against in the civil rights era. Berry’s identity crisis could be because blacks were associated with these qualities, which Berry didn’t want to be associated with. If this identity issue is true, then it contributes to Berry’s musical initiative of mixing white and black genres and being more open to attracting white audiences, contributing to the rise of rock and roll’s popularity throughout America for both races.
Berry’s impact on integration also extends to nightclubs beyond his initial days at the Cosmo Club. Berry opened a nightclub in St. Louis called Club Bandstand that was fully integrated[12]. Berry recounts his experience at shows early on in his career: “you’d go into a place and black and white, they can’t deal with it. They don’t care who it is. And they turned you away because they found out.”[13] Given the formal and informal segregation enforced at shows for white audiences, Club Bandstand’s message that all races were welcome was greatly effective. At the club, all races can enjoy music together, another initiative Berry took that helped desegregate music.
While Berry’s lyrics don’t directly talk about race, they contain messages with racial undertones that reflect the African-American experience. There is a trend of Berry writing poems after experiencing relations specifically with white women in his autobiography. Since his songwriting process came from his poetry, his feelings on interracial relationships inevitably made its way into his music. Berry wrote that as a child, “I was beginning to think of people in the form of poetry: If you’re white you're alright, if you’re yellow, you’re fair fellow. If you’re red, you’re low bred. If you’re brown, don’t come round, and if you’re black just stay back.”[14] In addition to his black identity issues, he couldn’t make clear references to race to ensure his music would be released. For example, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”, “Johnny B. Goode” and “It Don’t Take But a Few Minutes” were all inspired by Berry’s real-life experiences with racism and segregation, both in his personal life for the latter song, and his professional life for the former two songs. From a young age, Berry used his poetic songwriting to convey the status of African-Americans in society and his own experiences with racism growing up in St. Louis. Songwriting was an outlet to express his frustration about being a black man in America, but he did so in a subtle way, which ensured that his voice would be heard without censorship in making music for white audiences.
Chuck Berry faced many challenges as a black musician in the segregated society of the 1950s, both personally and professionally. Berry struggled like many other black musicians to overcome segregation in music publishing, public performances, and getting recognition as an artist. Despite this, Berry’s innovative style in music was able to transcend the identity politics of radio and record labels. Berry integrated two racially-influenced genres and propelled rock and roll as the music of a younger generation of Americans irrespective of race.
Footnotes:
[1] Cooperman.
[2] Berry, Autobiography, 25.
[3] Berry, Autobiography, 89.
[4] Berry, Autobiography, 89.
[5] Cooperman.
[6] Bennett, 21-22.
[7] Bennett, 27.
[8] Bennett, 37.
[9] Bennett, 15.
[10] Bennett, 120.
[11] Berry, Autobiography, 124-125.
[12] Ward, 218.
[13] Bennett, 52.
[14] Berry, Autobiography, 28-29.
Readings:
Bennett, Stephanie. Johnny B. Bad: Chuck Berry and the Making of Hail! Hail! Rock’N’Roll. Los Angeles: Rare Birds Book, 2019.
Berry, Chuck. After School Sessions. Chess Records, 1957.
--.Chuck Berry is on Top. Chess Records, 1959.
--.Chuck Berry: The Autobiography. New York: Harmony Books, 1987. First Edition.
Cooperman, Jeannette. A Conversation with Chuck Berry. St. Louis Magazine, Nov. 24, 2005.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Chuck Berry, 1986.
Ward, Ed. The History of Rock & Roll: Volume One 1920-1963. New York: Flatiron Books, 2016.