Community/Public Interest - Obituary
Chuck Berry’s Memoir Grabs You Like a Song By Dwight Garner
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huck Berry, who died on Saturday, March 18, 2017 at 90, was rock’s first great songwriter. Here’s what’s less known: He also wrote its first great memoir. “Chuck Berry: The Autobiography” was published in 1987. Its first sentence is a declaration of independence and intent: “This book is entirely written, phrase by phrase, by yours truly, Chuck Berry.” Not for him the bland evasions in those music memoirs ghostwritten, with added strings and synthesized filler, by hack journalists. He wrote much of the book in prison, where he was serving time for tax evasion. The early parts read as if he had scratched them in pencil, ecstatically, onto his cell wall.
One of the things that made Mr. Berry’s songs jump out of the radio was his mischievous feel for words and his knack for alighting on details so fresh that they squeak. “They finished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale,” he sang about the newlyweds in “You Never Can Tell.” “The Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” This same instinctive feel for language flows into the autobiography. You’re not far into it before he describes a friend who is “as ugly as death eating a dirty doughnut.” A few pages before that, a girl is so pretty that the author “would have daily taken out her garbage just to be near her can.” His sentences pop, as if he had a
Coolerator crammed with them. He writes about the world like a man noticing everything for the first time. Mr. Berry’s lyrics did not often confront race directly. He wanted his songs to have mass appeal, and that meant getting white listeners as well as black ones to put p dimes in the jukebox. But B in his autobiography, race is nearly always front r and center, and there a are powerful and awful a scenes. s When he was a young man, word got around m that Mr. Berry had slept t with a white woman. w Cops hauled him in, he C writes, and a sergeant w “positioned himself beside “ me m with a baseball bat cocked on his shoulder c as a though my head was to t be the baseball. I was told that if I lied just once, t the t sergeant would try for
a home run.” He gets out of this scrape by playing the fool, aware how close he’d come to death — a death no one would have investigated. Mr. Berry’s book details the indignities of touring in the South as a black musician during the 1950s and ’60s. There are the restaurants that would not seat him, the hotels
100 March 2017 Black Business News www.blackbbusinessnews.net 1-323-291-7819