The musicians Chuck Berry wanted to build his career around
When you’re considered to be the originator of a genre or movement within music in the way that Chuck Berry often is, then there’s often a question raised as to where your influences come from.
The blues had obviously existed for some time before Berry made his mark on the genre, but what was being made was a considerably more lamenting form that didn’t have the same amount of vivacious energy that he and his peers managed to transform it into. The slowness of blues music was antithetical to what popular music of the period sounded like, which was light and airy, and would take some major shifts in perspective to bring it to where it ended up.
Berry, alongside many others, transformed the blues into a more energetic style of music, making it more appropriate for dancing and opening it up for commercial success. By this point, it was being rebranded as rock and roll, but it was clear that there was still a significant amount of influence being derived from the blues music that had been so prevalent before it, and Berry certainly wanted to make his admiration for the style known to the world.
Of course, he didn’t single-handedly start this transition from blues to rock and roll, and he had plenty of contemporaries in the 1950s such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino and Little Richard, who were taking aspects of what had been done previously and mutating it into something that was far more raucous and attention grabbing.
He would carry this ethos into the ‘60s, but the culture began to change significantly in another direction by this point, with the advent of pop, rock and psychedelia all playing a major role in the downward trend of rock and roll’s popularity.
You’re often faced with a dilemma at this point as to whether you follow trends or stick to your guns, and with Berry being so stubborn in his ways and wanting to be known as the face of the genre, he opted to stay exactly where he was and continue to push rock and roll despite its declining popularity.
He clearly wanted to build things around this core group of influences, all of whom he’d kept as inspirations since the beginning, and during a 1987 interview on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he revealed the exact makeup of his sound through a concise list of inspirations.
“I wanted to sing like Nat Cole with lyrics like Louis Jordan, with the swing of Benny Goodman,” he revealed. “Playing Carl Hogan’s riffs, and with the soul of Muddy Waters. I had it all mixed in.”
You can’t really argue with this, having been a winning combination for Berry, and while there wasn’t as much space for artists of his ilk later on in his career, particularly by the time this interview was taking place in the late 1980s, he remained one of the most beloved artists and a game changer in blues and rock and roll.
