Did Chuck Berry steal the guitar riff to ‘Johnny B Goode’?
The genesis of rock and roll is impossible to nail down to one moment. Throughout the 1950s, artists were certainly starting to blaze the trail for where rock and roll could go, with Bill Haley and The Comets creating ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and Little Richard putting his signature flair into energised R&B. When most people think of ground zero for rock and roll, it doesn’t get any more clear-cut than Chuck Berry screaming out of the speakers playing the opening lick to ‘Johnny B Goode’.
By playing the basic blues scale behind a driving rhythm, Berry had created the signature sound of rock guitar, all while telling a story about a young kid who could play the guitar just like ringing a bell. It became a defining anthem. Although Berry could claim to be the genre’s godfather based on this one lick alone, his signature tune might not be entirely original.
For as long as Berry had been around, the sounds of R&B and blues had already started making inroads into rock and roll. Nearly a decade before Berry had started, the Louis Jordan song ‘Ain’t That Just Like A Woman’ reached the airwaves, baring a striking resemblance to Berry’s signature riff. Down to the single note opening lick on guitar, the song features the exact classic rundown of the scale as Berry’s tune before the whole band comes in behind him.
From there, though, both songs feature distinctly different productions, with the driving force of Berry’s guitar being replaced by horns in Jordan’s tune. Considering the song was around for nine years before ‘Johnny B. Goode’, is it possible that Berry had co-opted the Louis Jordan classic?
It’s possible, considering both songs draw from the same bluesy background and feature sliding licks. However, when viewed by themselves, each song draws on traditions that are older than any genre, only using the same fundamental arrangements to keep the song chugging at an insistent tempo.
In Berry’s defence, the blues also have a reasonably similar I-IV-V structure, so it’s possible that thousands of different songs could have shared the same chord structure. Even though the opening lick may be similar, there’s no way to own certain chords, so Berry would be perfectly within his right to use the basic 12-bar shuffle behind his song.
Even if Jordan’s tune was a big hit, what Berry did by transposing the line to electric guitar marked the clarion call for rock and roll. Using double stops instead of the one-note line, Berry gave the lick a lot more muscle, almost like an alarm began blaring out of the speakers the minute he started playing.
Not long after Berry took his song to the top, other rock legends would come forward brandishing their takes on Berry’s formula. For all of the great music Berry made on his own, artists like John Lennon and Keith Richards were making artistic innovations by playing off of what ‘Johnny B. Goode’ had already built. ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Ain’t That Just Like A Woman’ may have some similarities, but either way people view it, this was the start of a new musical art form getting ready to break free.
