Next Wednesday, October 18th, Chuck Berry turns 80. Berry is on that very, very, very short list of popular musicians who, beyond making great music, had a hand in setting the terms under which virtually all subsequent music has been made–those acts who’ve significantly shaped the world we inhabit.

So, for the next week or therebouts, Living in Stereo will offer meager tribute to the man who plays his guitar just like ringin’ a bell. There will be lots of music to share and several guest posters, so check in often. I want to start things off today by talking a bit about Chuck Berry and his relationship with country music.

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Elvis Presely and other early rock & rollers such as Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and the Everly Brothers are routinely cited as examples of white musicians who borrowed ideas and inspiration from rhtyhm & blues. But this interracial exchange inevitably moved in the other direction as well–that’s what made it rock & roll00as even a cursory examination of the biographies and discographies of Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry reveals.

Berry wasn’t merely familiar with country music; he was a fan. Perkins, who toured with Berry  in the fifties, remembered Chuck as a travelling companion who enjoyed singing along with him in the car to “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Knoxville Girl.” Berry even knew his Jimmie Rodgers so well that he could correct Perkins about which verses went with which Blue Yodel.

In his St. Louis days, Berry entertained clubgoers by changing the words to songs like “Mountain Dew” and “Jambalaya,” a part of his act that speaks not only to Berry’s affinity wtih country but seems to suggest a general level of knowledge about the genre among his black audience. At any rate, it was tinkering with the words to that country warhorse “Ida Red” that, with a dash of “Hot Rod Race,” and maybe even a bit of “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (That Cigarette),” sparked Berry’s discovery of the melody and rhythm for his breakthrough smash, 1955’s “Maybellene.”

You can hear the country in Berry’s music, even if you don’t know the back story. There’s so much twang in his music, and not just in his electric guitar playing but his vocals too. Unlike most of his blues and R&B contemporaries, Berry sings nasally, all up in his head. Like the best country singers, he tells a good story, he and pianist Johnny Johnson swing like a mo-fo, and, alonsgside all those records he aimed squarely at the teen market, Berry frequently addressed some very adult subject matter: Divorce in “Memphis,” the southern migration in “Johnny Bye, Bye,” mid-life crises in “Too Pooped to Pop,” cheating lovers in “Maybellene,” “Nadine” and his version of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms,” and military service in “Too Much Monkey Business.” Over and over, Berry sings about class and the American dream…”No Money Down,” “The Promised Land,” “Back in the USA,” “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Johnny B. Goode.”

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No wonder country singers have been doing Chuck Berry for almost as long as Chuck Berry has. Indeed, Marty Robbins scored a top ten hit with a rocking little cover of “Maybellene” that actually charted country the very same week that Berry’s version first charted R&B.

The Bakersfield Sound, of course, owed a great debt to Berry’s beats and licks, and Buck Owens returned the favor by recording more than one Berry tune–listen, for instance, to Don Rich crank that “Maybellne”-ish fill on the Buckaroos’ live “Johnny B. Goode.” Ernest Tubb sounds born to sing “Memphis,” Jerry Lee Lewis and his sister Linda Gail scored a minor country hit with “Roll OVer Beethoven” in 1969, and Freddy Weller took “The Promised Land” to #3 country the following year.

Of course, you could fill a Bear Family box with all of the Chuck Berry records made by country singers over the last fifty years. We’ll get to a few more of them, too, before we’re done honoring Berry. BUt these should get us started.

Chuck Berry “Crazy Arms” (1964) available on The Chess Box

Marty Robbins “Maybellene” from Rockin’ Rollin’ Robbins (Columbia, 1956)

Buck Owens “Johnny B. Goode” from In London (Capitol, 1969)

Ernest Tubb “Memphis” from the out-of-print Country Hits Old and New (Decca, 1966)

Jerry Lee Lewis & Linda Gail Lewis “Roll Over Beethoven” from the out-of-print Together (Smash, 1969)

Freddy Weller “The Promised Land” from the out-of-print The Promised Land/Another Night of Love (Columbia, 1971)

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