Catch Me if You Can

Chuck Berry brought poetry to pop and broke race barriers to become rock and roll's first guitar-playing frontman. As he recalled, it all began with some "hillbilly stuff' he revved into a rocker: "Maybellene."

- Denny Ilett and Christopher Scapelliti

If you had to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry, John Lennon once famously quipped. It was an apt point of reference for Lennon, a musician first drawn to rock and roll in 1955 by the vocal histrionics of Elvis Presley. Despite Presley's early influence on the emerging genre, by the late 1950s he had been eclipsed - at least in the eyes of guitar-wielding rockers by Chuck Berry. Where Presley had fused White country leanings with Black blues to create a vocal representation of this new music called rock and roll, Chuck was a Black guitarist with a liking for country and the wit to see its potential for him as a performer. He also had a poetic way with a words, unsurpassed clarity of diction and the ability to set '50s teen scenarios to music. And it was all there with his first record, the 1955 hit Maybellene, which launched not only his career but that of every rock and roll guitarist who followed.

Born into a large middle-class family in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 18, 1926, Charles Edward Anderson Berry was the fourth of six children. His father, Henry, was deacon of the Baptist church in the area of St. Louis called the Ville, where the family lived. His mother, Martha, was a school headmistress, which meant that Chuck and his siblings enjoyed a relatively prosperous upbringing contrary to that of many families — both Black and White - in the 1920s and 1930s.