Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born into a large middle-class family in St Louis, Missouri on 18 October 1926, the fourth of six children to Martha and Henry Berry. Henry was deacon of the Baptist church in the area of St Louis called The Ville, where the family lived. Martha was a school headmistress, which meant that Chuck and his siblings enjoyed a relatively prosperous upbringing contrary to that of so many black (and white) families in the 1920s and 1930s.

Chuck displayed an interest in music and poetry from a very young age and, encouraged by his parents, progressed quickly, making his first public appearance in 1941 at the age of 15, while still at high school. The song he chose, Confessin’ The Blues by Jay McShann, was a big band hit at the time and boasted in its ranks another fledgling genius in the form of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, one of the inventors of bebop jazz.

Chuck’s first of many brushes with the law occurred three years later when he was arrested, and convicted, for armed robbery. He was sentenced to three years at the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men in Algoa, Missouri, where he took up boxing along with forming a vocal quartet.

On the day of his 21st birthday in 1947, Berry was released from custody, and shortly after met Themetta Suggs. They were married in October 1948 and had a daughter, Darlin Ingrid, in October 1950. Berry worked in a variety of jobs in order to support his young family, including – significantly – two stints at car assembly plants in St Louis. Knowing the abundance of motorrelated metaphors in his later songs, it’s intriguing to picture a young man, bursting with ideas, working in a mundane job but composing riffs, rhythms and lyrics in his head to the beat of the factory machinery.

T-Bone’s Stake