by Kevin Burton
You knew any rock and roll road trip would have to stop by Memphis, right? Well, we are using a Chuck Berry vehicle to get there.
We’re going Coast to Coast this summer, talking rock and roll history by means of songs with a state or city in the title. Many historians think St. Louis native Chuck Berry was the engine that powered rock and roll. There is a very strong case to be made for that.
Eric Burden of the Animals called Berry “the Poet Lauriat of America.” That is not a formal designation but it’s a deserved tribute.
Berry’s 1958 signature song “Johnny B. Goode” is one of those songs that seemingly always existed, as some kind of force of nature. It’s as if nobody wrote it, it just is.
But Berry wrote it, and it became an instant standard.
“It was the blueprint for what rock and roll is supposed to be,” said singer/songwriter and producer Todd Rundgren. You could say the same for Berry himself.
With his writing, guitar playing and showmanship onstage, Berry was a foundation for what rock and roll became.
“It started with Chuck Berry. The first album I ever bought was Chuck’s ‘Live at the Tivoli’ and I was never the same. He was more than a legend, he was a founding father,” said singer/songwriter Rod Stewart upon Berry’s death in 2017. “You can hear his influence in every rock ’n’ roll band from my generation on.”
“Chuck Berry is one of the all-time great poets. A rock poet you could call him,” said John Lennon in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview. “He was well advanced of his time lyric-wise We all owe a lot to him.”
“Chuck Berry was rock’s greatest practitioner, guitarist, and the greatest pure rock ‘n’ roll writer who ever lived,” said singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen.
Berry’s “No Particular Place To Go” speaks to road trips, American leisure/decadence, life and love. He did a version of Bobby Troupe’s classic “Route 66” which fits our theme also.
In 1963 Berry also wrote the song we feature on Coast to Coast, a song he called “Memphis, Tennessee,” which those who have covered it since have shortened to “Memphis.”
Among the recurring themes of rock and roll lyrics are good love, bad love, lies, cheating, two timing, breakups, makeups, and losing that lovin’ feeling. What you don’t often hear are the stories of lives ripped apart by all this bad acting.
With Memphis, Berry told such a story. But the most pertinent detail was hidden until the last verse. It was clever in that way that great poets often are.
“This song tells quite a story and has an interesting twist ending,” according to SongFacts. “We hear about the singer getting a phone call from a girl who wouldn’t leave a number, but he knows it came from Memphis, Tennessee. He calls the operator, trying to locate his girl Marie, who he thinks is the one trying to reach him.”
“At the end of the song, we find out that Marie is his six-year-old daughter, and that he is a divorced father trying desperately to get in touch with her.”
“Chuck Berry drew on accounts he heard from friends and acquaintances to craft his lyric. “
“I had known couples who had divorced and the tragedies of the children,” Berry said.
“In the song the narrator is speaking to a long-distance operator, trying to find out the number of a girl named Marie, who lives in Memphis, Tennessee, ‘on the southside, high upon a ridge, just a half a mile from the Mississippi bridge,’” reads the song’s Wikipedia page.
The final verse reveals that Marie is, in fact, the narrator’s six-year-old daughter; her mother, presumably the narrator’s ex-wife, ‘tore apart our happy home’ because she ‘did not agree,’ as it turned out, with their marriage, not his relationship with Marie, as the listener was misdirected to assume.”
“This song was recorded in St. Louis at Chuck Berry’s home, in July 1958.”
Berry did not have a big hit with “Memphis,” but Johnny Rivers took the song to number twoin 1964, launching a career that included nine Top 10 singles.
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