Chuck Berry

The Ville was a middle-class Black neighborhood in north St. Louis, and Berry grew up in it with a contractor and Baptist deacon for a father and a certified public school principal for a mother. He sang in public for the first time at Sumner High School in 1941. He was still enrolled there in 1944 when he robbed three shops in Kansas City and took a car at gunpoint, and he spent the next three years in the reformatory at Jefferson City, released on his 21st birthday. He came home, married Themetta Suggs in 1948, worked an automobile assembly line, swept floors, and trained as a beautician at the Poro College of Cosmetology. By 1950 he owned a three-room brick cottage on Whittier Street.

He joined Johnnie Johnson's trio in 1953 and brought T-Bone Walker's guitar figures and stage manner into it. In May 1955 he drove to Chicago, found Muddy Waters and asked who he should see. Waters said Leonard Chess. On May 21 he cut Maybellene, a country song called Ida Red rewritten as a car chase, with Johnson on piano and Willie Dixon on bass, and it sold a million and topped the rhythm and blues chart. When the record appeared, two other names were on the writing credit, one of them the disc jockey Alan Freed, and Berry had to litigate to get them off. Then Roll Over Beethoven, School Days, Sweet Little Sixteen, Johnny B. Goode: cars, school, dancing, and a guitar introduction every band since has had to learn.

In December 1959 he was arrested under the Mann Act. He had brought a 14-year-old Apache waitress named Janice Escalante across state lines to work the hat check at his St. Louis club. The first conviction, in March 1960, was overturned on appeal because the trial judge's conduct toward him was racist. The second, in 1961, stood, and he served from February 1962 to October 1963. In 1979 he pleaded guilty to evading about 110,000 dollars in tax and did 120 days. In 1990 several women sued over a video camera in the ladies' room of his restaurant in Wentzville, and rather than fight he took a class settlement one biographer put above 1.2 million dollars. In 2000 Johnnie Johnson sued him for co-authorship of more than 50 songs and lost on the clock, not the merits.

Johnny B. Goode is the only rock and roll record on the Voyager Golden Record, which is now beyond the edge of the solar system and will outlast the country that launched it. He went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with its first class in 1986. From 1996 to 2014 he played one Wednesday a month in the basement of a bar in the Delmar Loop, a few miles from where he was born. At 90 he announced a new album, his first in 38 years, with his son and daughter on it. He died at home on March 18, 2017, and was entombed in St. Louis with a cherry-red Gibson bolted inside the coffin lid.

Chuck Berry's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Maybellene song
  Ida Red rewritten as a car chase. A million copies and the top of the R and B chart. 1955
• Roll Over Beethoven song
  Written, he said, about his sister monopolizing the family piano 1956
• Sweet Little Sixteen song
  The teenage audience described from the stage 1958
• Johnny B. Goode song
  The only rock and roll record carried on the Voyager Golden Record 1958
• My Ding-a-Ling song
  A novelty, and the only number one single of his career 1972
• Chuck album
  His first album in 38 years, announced at 90 and released after he died 2017

• 1941 aged ~15 Gives his first public performance at Sumner High School
• 1944 aged ~18 Convicted of armed robbery and sent to the reformatory at Jefferson City Three shops in Kansas City and a car taken at gunpoint. He was released on his 21st birthday in 1947.
• October 28, 1948 aged 22 Marries Themetta Suggs
• May 21, 1955 aged 28 Records Maybellene at Chess in Chicago Muddy Waters had told him who to ask for.
• 1958 aged ~32 Releases Johnny B. Goode
• February 1962 aged 35 Begins a Mann Act sentence he serves until October 1963 His first conviction had been overturned because of the trial judge's racist conduct.
• 1977 aged ~51 Johnny B. Goode leaves the solar system aboard the Voyager probes
• 1986 aged ~60 Inducted with the first class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
• March 18, 2017 aged 90 Dies at home in Missouri at 90

• Muddy Waters 1913–1983
  Chicago bluesman who electrified Delta blues and supplied a foundation for rock music. sent him to Chess Records
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. chose his record for the Voyager probes
• Bob Dylan b. 1941
  Songwriter whose poetic lyrics transformed folk, rock, and the role of popular music in public life. took the lyric method
• Bruce Springsteen b. 1949
  Songwriter whose music made working-class life, aspiration, and disappointment central themes of American rock. inherited the car songs
• Jimi Hendrix 1942–1970
  Guitarist whose sound, technique, and performance style revolutionized rock music. rebuilt the guitar he defined