The guitar matters all by itself. Some people think it’s easy. Those are the ones who can’t do it. An interviewer for Guitar Player magazine pointed out that most people who try to play “Chuck Berry” guitar don’t get it right. “Have you noticed that people who approximate your sound often play a watered-down version—more pentatonic or bluesy, less moving around the fingerboard, less major scale?” Chuck is too polite or diplomatic to respond directly, but the question is right on. Although his music is based mostly on the blues, it departs frequently from the so-called “blues scale,” both on the guitar itself, and in the melodies. A good example is the song “School Day” (or its melodic twin, “No Particular Place to Go.”) Most of it is a pure blues shuffle with riffs older than Robert Johnson, but during the guitar solo on “School Day” there’s something more, major scale riffs Chuck Berry must have copped from his teenage years listening to big band swing, but done in Chuck Berry’s unique “double-stop” style, where he plays two strings at a time. He talks in his Autobiography about the day he became “fluent enough picking the guitar to fill in full choruses without repeating licks.” The guitar tells its own stories. According to Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, “he would build his solos so there was a nice little statement taking the song to a new place, so you're ready for the next verse.”
The best guitarists admit it isn’t easy. “He is rhythm supreme,” says Keith Richards. “He plays that lovely double-string stuff, which I got down a long time ago, but I'm still getting the hang of.” (A funny, well known scene from the movie Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll shows Chuck giving Keith a painful tutorial in one double string slur.) “A lot of people have done Chuck Berry songs,” says Aerosmith’s Perry, “but to get that feel is really hard. It's the rock and roll thing—the push-pull and the rhythm of it." The early records emphasize that tension between the skipping shuffle drum patterns and Chuck’s sometimes straight ahead rock and roll rhythm work. “His guitar leads drove the rhythm, as opposed to laying over the top,” said Perry. The sound is unique and instantly recognizable. Like other great musicians he took bits and pieces from his predecessors and created something new and fresh that changed music as we know it. “We're all part of this family that goes back thousands of years,” said Keith Richards. “Chuck got it from T-Bone Walker, and I got it from Chuck, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and B. B. King.”
Berry is up front about his own influences. “There is nothing new under the sun,” he says frequently. He is quick to cite influences that include T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian, Lonnie Johnson, Carl Hogan, Elmore James, and even his old St. Louis friend, Ira Harris, the man who first taught him to play. “He was into jazz, and the way he could manipulate the sound, I knew I had to do that. He played a bit like Christian, and a lot of what he showed me is a part of what I do.”
I remember the first time I heard T-Bone Walker on record and recognized the familiar slur that Chuck Berry uses so often, most famously during the intro to “Johnny B. Goode.” And I remember the first time I ever heard the guitar introduction to Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t that Just Like a Woman,” a jazzy, single string version of the familiar intro to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and about half the songs Chuck Berry plays live. Jordan’s guitarist, Carl Hogan, must have invented the phrase, and Berry made it his own, adding the double string approach and topping it off with the T-Bone Walker slur. (And then we all copped it from Chuck, and say we’re playing “Chuck Berry” when we do a simplified version!) Old blues records continue to surprise me. Recently I heard what I’ve always considered a uniquely “Chuck Berry” lick coming off a guitar played by Louis or David Myers about a minute and 20 seconds into the Little Walter instrumental “Sad Hours,” which was on the R&B charts back in 1952, when the journeyman Chuck Berry was developing his professional chops at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis. I had a similar experience listening to Benny Goodman play his clarinet on “Flyin’ Home”—because suddenly there it was, a “Chuck Berry” lick, twenty years early, on woodwinds!
But wherever it came from, it’s a sound that just about everyone who followed considered indispensible. “He’s really laid the law down for playing that kind of music,” said Clapton. He was a favorite of Jimi Hendrix, of Keith Richards, of Perry. Clapton copied him in his early years. The Beach Boys, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones built their early careers off his songs and his style.
B. B. King and Jimi Hendrix are the only two guitarists who have had such a direct impact on rock guitar players. King’s style (like Berry’s, rooted partly in T-Bone Walker, but with bent single string runs and tremolo) is probably just as influential as Berry’s. Both men rose from similar influences at the same moment in time. Every modern rock and roll guitarist owes a great deal to one or both. (Add their student, Jimi, to the list and it’s done.) True—since they all learned from T-Bone Walker you could argue that his influence is larger, and since Robert Johnson informed just about everyone, you could say the same of him. But for the rock side of rock and roll, Clapton had it right: Chuck Berry laid down the law.
Not only that, but he did it with so much cool, energy and style that guitar moved front and center. At the start, maybe piano was king. But when Chuck Berry put the guitar out front, played it like crazy, danced with it, gave it a hero named “Johnny,” and made everybody want one, he changed the face of popular music for generations.
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