Wasted Chuck Berry op-ed

Friday 10/16/26

Couldn't use this. Obviously better than anything else written on Chuck Berry as well as anything in any op-ed section.

The stories of Chuck Berry.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri on October 18, 1926, Chuck Berry came to be myriad things. Rock and roll pioneer and hitmaker. Guitar wizard and duckwalking showman. Slick and smart poet of rhythm and blues. But what Chuck Berry did better than anyone was compose stories that happened to also be songs.

Nothing connects people to each other more than stories. Whether that’s something shared from a life or an invented narrative that helps us better see some aspect of the life we’re leading.

Think of what causes us to lean close to someone else so that we might listen better. We can be waiting at a bus stop when someone next to us begins a story to their companion, and we fight the urge to eavesdrop.

We become less story-oriented with each passing year, which makes for small wonder that we’re increasingly disconnected. There’s no story by William Faulkner that achieves more narratively than Berry’s “Promised Land” from 1964. That classic, Berry lead-in riff—as instantly identifiable an American musical sound as the hammering refrain of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy”—fast tracks us into this cross-country saga of a Black man journeying from Norfolk, Virginia to Los Angeles, with his issues along the way and the help he seeks to get.

It’s a story of epic proportions despite the ostensibly quotidian subject matter. The images come thick, fast, providing us traction in this narrative land. There’s despair, jubilation. It’s both a protest song/story and a punch-the-air celebration of coming out the other side.

Chuck Berry didn’t just play and record his songs; he told you them. To hear “Let It Rock,” about some men working on the tracks with a train coming through, or the absolutely brilliant “Memphis, Tennessee,” a tragic account of a man separated from his daughter that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have killed to write, is to feel chosen to be a unique receiver of a unique story.

One of the wonderful aspects of a great story is that it also belongs to the person to whom it is told. A story is a connective compact. Much of our lives now are about walls. Erecting them. Peaking over their tops to see if what’s on the other side might be safe. Great stories raze them.

As Berry displayed, a great story requires special language. For him, there was the language of his music, helped by that guitar prowess and his pianist, Johnnie Johnson, and the music in his language. His verbs are powerhouses of energy. A Greyhound bus is “straddled.” A character “smokes” into town. His words couldn’t be anyone else’s words.

You can’t tell a story with language lifted from the scrapheap of social media phraseology. “Gives him his flowers,” “No notes,” Chef’s kiss,” etc. The best stories, even when they’re invented, are honest and personal. They say much about the teller.

Berry’s 1958 hit, “Johnny B. Goode,” is a musical story in less than three minutes that has as much narrative juice as Handel’s Messiah. What is time with a story well told? How is length measured when three minutes might as well be 300 lifetimes?

“Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans,” Berry begins, “Way back up in the woods among the evergreens,” and we’re riveted. More, please.

In the Strokes’ “Reptilia,” Julian Casablancas sings, “Tell us a story, I know you’re not boring.” Stories are the least boring thing on earth, and we’ve moved far away from them. We need them. Our imaginations need them. Our relationships. They restore and inspire us. Free us. They can arm us. Give us a chance to fight back against that which seeks to oppress us. A great story is a slingshot, a comet, and a sun.

Johnny B. Goode wants to see his name in lights, which isn’t just about a marquee. It’s about arrival and illumination.

Stories make it a lot easier to get where we need to go. Light out on that midnight flier. Tell a story, hear a story, be story. Otherwise you’re just going ‘round and ‘round the same block to nowhere.