Mick Hartley

Can't quite let Chick Berry go without one more live performance. This one's on Belgian TV, from 1965. God knows who's backing him, but it doesn't matter: it's all about Chuck and his guitar. An amazing performance:

I said last week that he'd had the "brilliant idea of writing rock'n'roll songs with lyrics that appealed to white teenagers". Which may not be quite fair, but certainly no other black R'n'B artist of the time could possibly have come up with that lyric – "Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news".

Bob Dylan – "When I first heard Chuck Berry, I had no idea that he was black. I thought he was white hillbilly."

The early years:

By early 1953 Berry was performing with Johnnie Johnson's trio, starting a long-time collaboration with the pianist. The band played mostly blues and ballads, but the most popular music among whites in the area was country. Berry wrote, "Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it." Berry's calculated showmanship, along with a mix of country tunes and R&B tunes, sung in the style of Nat King Cole set to the music of Muddy Waters, brought in a wider audience, particularly affluent white people.

If you missed it, David Remnick's obit in the New Yorker is worth a read.