The Politics of Being Chuck Berry - POLITICO Magazine

Chuck Berry insisted he didn’t write political songs. He couldn’t afford to. “I made records for people who would buy them," Berry said. "No color, no ethnic, no political — I don't want that, never did.”

Indeed, Berry, who died Saturday at age 90, took pains to scrub the lyrics to his genre-defining rock ‘n’ roll songs of specific references that might give his audience offense. In his memoir written in 1987, the year after he was enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he revealed how he had substituted “country boy” for “colored boy” in “Johnny B. Goode,” toning down the tune’s autobiographical element and turning it into anthem of youthful aspiration.

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It wasn’t his only chart-topping song, most of them written in the 1950s and 60s, in which he made such accommodations. He did it in “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and he even managed to skirt the obvious lunch-counter segregation of the day to celebrate America’s drive-ins and grilled hamburgers in “Back in the U.S.A.” But those subtle shadings lend a poignancy to Berry’s work, as undeniable as the joyous roar of his guitar, which made a sound unlike anything that came before and was borrowed by so many who followed.

Berry would not confess to writing serious songs, at least not often. He wrote songs, he would say, about things that were universal: love, school, fast cars, cool music and hot dances. But the formidable singer-songwriter nevertheless offered a keyhole picture of what it was like to be a black man in the United States of the 1950s. It was a peek into the gap between the rhetoric of the American dream and the reality of a country that was far from colorblind.

His best songs from the 1950s and 1960s were three-minute bursts of energy, filled with humor, clever phrases and details a novelist would have been proud to render — "I've never seen a coffee-colored Cadillac, but I know exactly what one looks like," Bruce Springsteen, a songwriter with a similar love of a good narrative, once said about Berry’s song "Nadine." That made him the perfect fit for a time when the first baby boomers were flexing their muscles as young consumers even as America was enjoying a prosperity it hadn't experienced in decades. "They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale," Berry sang of the young married couple in "You Never Can Tell." "The Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale."

Another song, "No Money Down," bought into every ad man's sales pitch, with the protagonist ordering up a special new car jam-packed with features including "a full Murphy bed in my back seat." Berry was, music critic Jonathan Green once opined, "John Steinbeck for a generation raised on conspicuous consumption."

But there was a racial subtext to the Berry’s canon that shouldn't be ignored. Berry, after all, had grown up in a segregated Missouri. He says he had never seen a white person before he was 3 until some firemen came to put out a blaze in his neighborhood. As a young man, he once was hauled into a police station on a rumor that he had slept with a white woman; the officer doing the questioning did so holding a baseball bat. One of his strongest childhood memories was being turned away, because of his race, from a St. Louis movie theater when his father brought him to see "A Tale of Two Cities." Five decades later, director Taylor Hackford would film Berry at the same theater, performing with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and other worshipful stars in honor of his 60th birthday.

“Chuck is a total contradiction," Hackford said in 2016. “He’s a proud black man. On the other hand, he has a very critical view of different parts of society — racial and political and everything else."

"Johnny B. Goode," his best-known song, reflects that contradiction. The protagonist is young and hopeful, a guitarist living "deep down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans, way back up in the woods among the evergreens," but on his way to stardom. Still, Berry describes his hero as a "country" boy not a "colored" one. In 1958, Berry thought it was too big a leap of faith for white audiences to accept a musical hero of color.

"My first thought," he wrote in his 1987 autobiography, "was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'colored boy' and changed it to 'country boy.'"

"Brown Eyed Handsome Man," a 1956 hit made up of a series of vignettes, was very clearly about "brown-skinned" men in all but the name. The first line — “Arrested on charges of unemployment” — isn’t explicitly about racial injustice but it isn’t hard to read it that way given the Jim Crow era in which it was written. But every verse, right up until the brown-eyed handsome smacks a game-winning home run, is a wry, encoded ode to racial pride, of black men triumphing over adversity and society’s expectations.

"A decade before 'black is beautiful' achieved radical chic," critic Dave Marsh wrote of the song in 1989, "Chuck communicated that very message with a jittery, ragged guitar line and rapid-fire vocal delivery that suggested just how much he risked merely by celebrating the facts. ... Here, Chuck fakes nothing — except for his substitution of "-eyed" for "-skinned," of course.

Berry said he wrote the song after his first tour of California, when "the auditoriums were predominantly filled with Hispanics and 'us.'" This was at a time when most of the places he played in the South were segregated by law and/or custom. (A decade later, Van Morrison would make the same switch, changing "Brown-Skinned Girl" to "Brown Eyed Girl," though Morrison, a fan of Berry's, has never been clear whether this song was some sort of tribute to one of his favorite musicians or not.)

No song of Berry's represented the gap between the American dream and the reality of the day more than "Back in the U.S.A.," a 1959 hit. The first three verses are about Berry's joy at returning to the United States, as he rattles off his favorite places, including "old St. Lou." The fourth verse, though, gets to the central contradiction of the song.

Looking hard for a drive-in
Searching for a corner cafe
Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day
Yeah, and the jukebox jumping with records back in the USA

At the time he wrote those words, Berry was a touring veteran. Being on the road in the 1950s was neither easy nor glamorous, and Berry had to get used to eating sandwiches on the side of the road because finding restaurants and hotels that would serve an African-American was often difficult and sometimes impossible. In his autobiography, he coined the word "hospitaboo" to reflect the reception he got in the South. The word, Berry said, combined "hospitality with taboo, or in other words, 'How do you do but don't you dare.'''

"Back in the U.S.A." was recorded months before the first civil-rights sit-ins occurred at a North Carolina lunch counter. The idea that a black male could walk into the front door of any restaurant, order what he wanted and sit there and eat was still a foreign concept in much of America.

A colorful 1964 song, "Promised Land," sent his protagonist on a fits-and-starts trip from Virginia to California — a bus breaks down in Alabama, and our hero has to be rescued by someone or other in Louisiana and then again in Texas, where someone gets him on an airplane. Clearly, this was something that African-Americans who had attempted interstate travel could relate to.

Of course, Berry rarely talked about his songs in this context, particularly when he was performing them. A prickly personality who had repeated brushes with the law — including for tax evasion, and transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes — he tended to be guarded about his life. And one can take this point too far — it's not like his little revelations about race were a huge part of his remarkable career, or even of his personal life. There is a record of a single $1,000 donation he made to the Democratic Leaders Victory Fund in 2000. He jammed at a concert, hoping to help lure the 2012 Democratic convention to his hometown of St. Louis. A few years ago, at a point in his life and career when he said his “throat is worn and my lungs are going fast,” he felt he could talk more freely about race and the meaning of an Obama presidency: “I never thought that a man with the qualities, features, and all that he has, [could] be our president. My dad said, ‘You may not live to see that day,’ and I believed him. I thank God that I have.”

As people celebrate Berry’s achievements, it's worth remembering that race was an indisputable part of who he was and what he had to say. Even if he didn’t always say it out loud.

"Remember that my view," he said in his autobiography, "the only true view I can see with, is through the black eyes that I have."