He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that - nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll.Ĭhuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries.
But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music.
That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation.īut people will always want to push against those constraints. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race.Ī hint - if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist.īecause genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music.īut first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler.Īnd if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced.
There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001.Īnd for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however - while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. I used three main books as reference here:īrown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. I reference three previous episodes here - last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.Īs always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Download file | Play in new window | Recorded on April 22, 2019