The blues singer Chuck Berry compared to meeting the Pope: “It was the feeling”
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t compare meeting their favourite musician to interacting with some sort of god. And Chuck Berry, despite being that very person for countless people, once experienced the same feeling.
If you were to ask practically any rock musician about their core influences, the chances are that Berry will be among them. After all, Berry is one of the few musicians whose influence will never be up for debate, a true founding father who seeps into the very fabric of rock ‘n’ roll itself, a pivotal figure in rock’s origin story, if you will.
And that observation is hardly a secret. After all, countless musicians have praised his extraordinary talent, from Paul McCartney to Keith Richards, with John Lennon even once summarising his entire legacy in just one simple sentence: “If you want to give rock ‘n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.”
With songs that, according to McCartney, were “more like poems than lyrics”, Berry was a positive force of energy during an especially turbulent time, with people turning to his music for a sense of hope when, everywhere they looked, things were bleak. His message was clear: when nothing else made sense, the simple joys of music could reinforce what life was truly about, simultaneously sparking a cultural revolution and helping guide society out of dark times.
This is also likely why some people described him as a rock god… After all, Berry’s aura, both on stage and off, was what some could only compare to some sort of deity, as though he’d been crafted by some cosmic entity for the sole purpose of stirring up a cultural frenzy with his incomprehensible, otherworldly excellence.
Berry’s presence in rock is so big, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine him ever looking up to anyone else, much less idolising them and seeing them as though they were gods themselves. However, this is precisely how he felt when he met the legendary blues hero himself, Muddy Waters.
Berry’s love for Waters makes sense when you consider how much blues informed the progression of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, but the ‘Father of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ also fell in love with how Waters made music feel like a living, breathing thing, and sought to emulate the same in his own music. As he once admitted, he wanted to “sing like Nat Cole”, write like Louis Jordan, incorporate swing like Benny Goodman, play riffs like Carl Hogan, and perform “with the soul of Muddy Waters”.
You can imagine, then, that when he first met Waters in the flesh, Berry felt like he was in the presence of pure genius. Recalling the time he famously attended his show in Chicago for 50 cents and met Waters after, Berry said, “It was the feeling, I suppose, one would get from having a word with the president or the Pope.”
Berry also asked Waters for advice on how he could make his own music, to which Waters suggested he contact Chess Records and use his name to land an audition. As history tells us, it worked, with Berry ultimately landing far more than a simple industry connection.
