Who did Chuck Berry call “the greatest bluesman ever”?
Rock and roll has never existed in a vacuum. The old guard of rock and roll may have been ready and willing to make music that could get the party started and piss off some of the straights, but they knew that some of the greatest music ever made descended down from genres like jazz and even a fair bit of country music as well. However, for Chuck Berry, all roads led back to the blues, and he was the first to say that he wasn’t the finest blues player the world had ever known.
When looking at Berry’s style of playing, it was a far more aggressive version of what the blues purists had been doing for years. It set the world on fire and gave way to what rock and roll would become, but when listening to something like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘Johnny B Goode’, it didn’t really have the same kind of lowdown and dirty swagger that you would get out of those old Robert Johnson records from ages past.
If anything, Berry became an ambassador for what the blues could sound like for rock and rollers. Keith Richards had already been one of Berry’s biggest fans, but it didn’t take long for him to start digging beneath the surface and singing the praises of everyone from Buddy Guy to Howlin’ Wolf for giving Berry the idea to make music that was a little bit faster than usual.
Berry may have been fast in his day, but all the blues wasn’t about strictly playing the most technical run of notes anyone had ever heard. It was about the energy you created whenever you were onstage, and by the time people like Muddy Waters started coming to the forefront, there was hardly any way to ignore him whenever he talked about working his mojo.
Whether with an acoustic or an electric guitar, Waters felt like the kind of person who wanted to tell a story with a beat behind him half the time. All good music is descended from great storytellers, and even if it came down to lyrics about how a woman did him wrong, it was always worth it to hear some of his guitar licks. Berry may have been a great storyteller, but he heard something in Waters’s music that went beyond traditional songwriting.
This was someone showcasing what music could be in its rawest form, and for Berry, no one else could compare to him in the blues world, saying when introducing him, “[He’s] the greatest man that I see before my eyes. The greatest bluesman to ever walk the Earth. This is a bluesman, and when I say blues, you need to have big lips to say it.”
And while Berry has gone down in history for being one of the most identifiable guitarists of his generation, it’s easier to pick out the guitarists who have done their homework and gone back to what Muddy Waters had done. There are obvious parallels between him and people like Eric Clapton during the British blues boom, but Billy Gibbons always shouted Waters’s praises, always feeling a kinship between what he did in Chicago and what he was doing in Texas with ZZ Top.
However, whereas most artists like to pit themselves against the other old dogs in town, Berry never saw himself as a competitor when playing next to Waters. Every dog has the potential to learn some new tricks, and whenever Waters stepped on that stage, there were two camps of people in the audience: those who wanted to listen, and the guitarists who were furiously taking notes while they watched his fingers.
