erally pulling music out of the air.

The instruments Morris favored tended ''When I began seriously composing, I found I couldn't get notation to
toward the exotic for jazz. The last ensemble I saw him with comprised four do what I wanted it to do. When I hear a lot of notated chamber music, it
acoustic basses, two cellos, three violins, piano, drums, oboe, trumpet, and sounds like it's music that's still on the page-like music you see instead
trombone. On the conductions from Turkey and Japan, some players use of music yoh hear. I was trying to figure out how to get notated music to
traditional folk instruments like the kemenceand the koto. rise up off the page."
Morris's family turns out to have been very musical. Besides brother Though Morris is as trained as they come, his approach to music mak-
Wilber, his sister Marceline was an award-winning concert pianist in her ing has more in common with hip-hop producers like The RZA than with
youth, while his older brother, Joseph, was a citywide clarinet champion his jazz contemporaries. Not only in its results, but in Morris's attitude
who went on to become a champion boxer in the military. Butch took up toward his player-haters: "I've forged ahead fueled by resistance •.A lot
trumpet at the age of fourteen; he credits Miles and Gil Evans's collabo- of times, the more resistance I met, the more courage I got in a strange
rations with sparking his own music awakening. sort of way. A lot of people say, 'Well, you can't do that-what gives you
After graduating from high school in 1966, Morris enlisted in the the right? Improvisation is supposed to be free.' Of course I can do it;
Army; on the same day, he was drafted. His first post after basic was you see me doing it. That's a very European notion, that improvisation
Stuttgart, Germany, where he got to rile southern rednecks with his Nina means just play what you want. There is a system, a vocabulary. All I
Simone and John Coltrane records. "I wasn't listening to that music po- want to do is teach you the system so I can create a structure around
litically until those guys brought it to my attention," he says. "After that, what you have to contribute."
I'd play it whenever they came in the barracks drunk. A lot of fights Are we talking chaos or democracy here? You needed to hear and see
broke out from me playing Nina Simone." Morris do his thang before you decide. While you were making up your
Morris mighifave missed Vietnam had he not put in for a transfer. mind, Morris kept on waving his magic baton and conjuring up the most
"I started taking pills for my nerves because a lot of crazy stuff started multiculturally inclusive sounds this side of a United Nations summit
happening in the bar,,acks, like homosexual rapes, drugs, killings, and a conference.
lot of racist stuff. The doctor told me he couldn't give me any more pills "What I'm interested in now is the symphonic orchestra," he says,
because I'd become dependent. I put in for a transfer and told them, "because it's stagnant, even the twentieth-century stuff. And it doesn't
don't tell me where you're sending me. They made me a medic when I got matter whether it's Penderecki, Xenakis, or Boulez. It's not my taste,
to Vietnam because they were short on medics. They'd bring a guy in and and it doesn't get in my body. Whether my music is considered jazz or
say, 'Morris, sew him up and ship him out.' That was my training. not, I still consider myself a jazz musician, and whether you think my
"The thing that trips me out was that the day I almost lost my life music swings or not, it still contains the things that make swing happen,
was the day the colonel said he wanted some flowers on his desk. I went which are combustion, ignition, and propulsion. What I'm talking about
out to this field to pick flowers, and we got shot at. When I got back, it is how you get from under there, how you heat an orchestra up, how you
hit me that I could have been dead because this colonel wanted some ignite that shit and set it on fire. That's what I'm talking about."
-1997-
motherfucking flowers."
Morris returned home intending to study prosthetics and, instead,
discovered Arthur Blythe and Bobby Bradford, two pillars of the West
Coast free jazz scene, rehearsing in his mother's garage with brother Wil-
ber. "What they were playing was really the Black revolution," he says. "It
was a very melodic free music. It was ruthless, but there was some roman-
ticism attached to it. I heard it as all this black that they had sprinkled
CharlesEdwardAndersonBerryand
the History of Our Future
4
a little blue on. What they played would go so deep in your soul, man. It The poet Amiri Baraka likes to asks this relevant rhetorical question: If
also made me think, "Now that's some bad shit, but where is my shit at?" Elvis Presley is king, who is James Brown-God?
Morris found his answer in composition (he is an extraordinary In this same vein, Little Richard once held the Grammys hostage by
melodist, a kaleidoscopic arranger) and later, in developing conduction. declaring himself the Architect of Rock 'n' Roll.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry 57

56 TheBlackMale Show
 Now while I do believe the Godfather of Soul to have been an African The bell-ringing guitar intro to "Johnny B. Goode" is as heraldic,
deity on loan to the world, the flesh, and the devil, I must confess to annunciatory, and emancipatory an invitation in American music as
finding Brother Penniman's statement as arguably askew. Because while those new beginnings heard on Louis Armstrong's "Weather Bird," John
Brer King Richard is certainly the Great Emancipator of androgyny, ab- Coltrane 1s A Love Supreme, the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," and Jimi
stract expressionism, and glam in postwar American music-as well as Hendrix's ''Voodoo Chile." All of which let all other musicians know that
the man who begat the ecstasy of agony one hears in James Brown, Otis there was a new sheriff in town. All are musical exemplars of what us
Redding, Gene Simmons, and Ziggy Stardust. Yet for all of that, the Real folk here in critical theory land like to call an epistemic break-hell, an
Architect of Rock and Roll, we would counter, the Master Builder, as it epistemic breakdown, really. Some hella krunk nouveau knowledge that
were, of this house we all currently inhabit could be none other than to- interrupts, disrupts, and transforms our sense of life's possibilities and
night's most honored guest, Mr. Charles Edward Anderson Berry. the kind of folk we believe to be forces for apocalyptic change in the
Every form of music needs a daring and original framer of its consti- world too.
tution and its constituent parts-primarily so that all those who follow From this end of history's telescope it might seem inevitable that
that intrepid strict constructionist soul might have a strong structural the cat known to the world as Chuck Berry would have become the true
reference to aspire to. And a lyrical key to the gateway-a Rosetta Stone, Crown Prince of All Rockers. Yet as we know from his joyride of an au-
as it were, to translate the mysteries of the Master's tongue into a lan- tobiography, one clearly written in his own quite literate hand, Chuck
guage any fool could clearly understand and repeat to others. Berry could also have become a master carpenter and jack of all build-
Such a person generally provides a formal and symbolic transparency ing trades like his hardworking dad, Henry William Berry Sr., or a
to his chosen music. Kind of like that of life science's double-helix, an car thief, reform school recidivist, professional women's hairdresser,
iconic figure who binds together the thing's major figures and its minor photographer, stenographer, or boxer.
grooves into atflustrative and spiraling totem. The kind of thing many Mr. Berry is also the beloved son of a mother, Martha Banks Berry,
people will come to admire from miles around. Come hear you play that a college-educated woman who taught high school English for decades.
guitar till the sun comes down. A mother from whom we surmise came Berry's lyrical command and ro-
Fletcher Henderson's big band was not truly swinging until Louis mance of the language. Had the guitar not become a teenage obsession
Armstrong spent a year and a half in the orchestral mix sonically seduc- Mr. Chuck Berry might have spun his wordsmith skills into a literary
ing his fellows into the sweetbread of syncopated rhythm. Dizzy Gil- career, perhaps one not unlike two other dark and compositionally tal-
lespie tells us that while he, Thelonious Monk, and Mary Lou Williams ented sons of the Corn Belt addicted to writing and wanderlust-Joplin,
had worked out the complex and highfalutin theory of bebop years be- Missouri's James Langston Hughes and Oklahoma City's Ralph Waldo
fore they met Charlie Parker, it wasn't until they heard Bird that they Ellison.
knew how the music called their music was supposed to sound~how Mr. Chuck Berry fell to earth on October 18, 1926. This astrologically
all those higher intervals were supposed to flow together with love and marks him as a Libra, and an air sign, just like your current speaker, who
affection, be kept moving strong and in the right direction. was born ten days before the launch of Sputnik.
Somebody asks Louis Armstrong how is it that he plays so beauti- October 18 is a birthday day Mr. Berry shares with quite a diverse
fully. Pops told 'em, "I just imagine a big ol' fruit tree, and try to pick the and motley crew: actor Joe Morton of Brother from Another Planet and
ripest fruit." Scandal fame, blues diva Jessie Mae Hemphill, anti-civil rights Dixie-
Every spanking new musical twist needs an avatar to hang, plant, and crat Senator Jesse Helms, singer/songwriter Laura Nyro, playwright
pluck its ripest fruit upon, its own Johnny Appleseed. The music we call Ntozake Shange (of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide fame),
rock and roll was bequeathed Mr. Johnny B. Goode himself, Chuck Berry. alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and more recently the
Berry is the iconic template and the role model of every cocky, geeky, and young slasher-singer/songwriter/producer/actor-Ne-Yo.
charming guy with a radical guitar style we've seen since who roams the Astrologers tell us that October 18 people are dynamic, spirited, ener-
land reeling and rockin' to the beat of his own boogie while confessing to getic self-starter types who refuse to sugarcoat their opinions to please
immense sexual frustration and extreme landspeed velocity. others and are ambitious to the point of seeming aggressive. October 18

58 The Black Male Show Charles Edward Anderson Berry 59

 people do not like playing in the background but tend to have great ana- interest. A more developed Case Western conversation about the ques-
lytical intelligence and often do very well as engineers, architects, de- tion of reparations in Missouri will also have to await a later day. But
signers, city planners, teachers, and musicians. People born on this date let's take a break here to watch a reverie by Mr. Berry himself on the
we're also told are extremely budget minded and have the patience to history of slavery and his personal memories of segregation in the state.
save for big-ticket items. Like fleets of multico]ored Cadillacs and their Even though we're here tonight paying tribute to the debt rock and
own theme parks. (Many of you have been to Graceland but who here roll owes to Chuck Berry it would be irresponsible if we didn't pay some
has been to Berry Land?) attention to the debt owed those African warrior-souls, enslaved and
The year in which Mr. Berry joined the human race-the year of our free, of an earlier Amerfra who helped make Chuck Berry and his music
lawd childe 1926-turns out to have been quite a generous one for pro- humanly possible.
viding a ripe and bountiful bevy of iconoclasts, innovators, prophets, According to exploreStLouis.com, "early census figures show blacks,
and anarchists of many stripes. Musically 1926 delivered unto the world both free and slave, lived in St. Louis from its earliest days under French
Miles Davis, Morton Feldman, Big Mama Thornton, Joan Sutherland, and Spanish colonial rule. In fact, black settlers were listed among those
Ray Brown, John Coltrane, Iannis Xenakis, David Tudor, Tony Ben- killed defending St. Louis from the British in the Revolutionary War
nett, and Oscar Brown Jr. To other areas of human endeavor 1926 was Battle of Fort San Carlos, which took place on what are now the Gate-
kind enough to provide Fidel Castro, Jerry Lewis, Hugh Hefner, Mari- way Arch grounds."
lyn Monroe, Steve Hercules Reeves, Neal Cassady, To Kill a Mockingbird Missouri is notably where in 1847 an enslaved man named Dred Scott
author Harper Lee, the master of grindhouse cinema Roger Corman, and his wife Harriet first sued for their freedom in what eventually be-
Green Lantern illustrator Gil Kane, Beat-poet laureate Allen Ginsberg, came infamously known as the Dred Scott Decision of 1857-wherein
Young Frankenstein Blazing Saddles director Mel Brooks, Robert Bly of ten years later the U.S. Supreme Court determined that people of Afri-
Iron John fart\, and France's own Michel Foucault. (Mr. Foucault, we feel can descent brought into the States under slavery were not to be con-
compelled to add, was most notably the author of a three-volume set, sidered US. citizens and neither were their descendants. It is said that
The History of Sexuality. Each volume seems well applicable to a Chuck this decision helped to hasten the onset of the Civil War but Dred Scott
Berry discussion: The Will to Knowledge, The Use of Pleasure, The Care of himself died within a year of finally receiving his freedom.
the Self A major dissertation beckons on the Foucault/Berry connection Among Mr. Berry's regional ancestors are the first all-Black regi-
but for time's sake we'll save that discursive magic trick for some other ment of the Civil War, the Sixty-Second Regiment of United States Col-
Case Western fellow from another time and another galaxy far far away.) ored Troops, organized in Missouri in 1864. Members of this regiment
Nineteen twenty-six was clearly a spectacular year for birthing folk were also the key founders of Lincoln University. One thousand and
hell bent on doing things My Way and The Highway. Obviously Berry fits sixty-eight members of the Fifty-Sixth U.S. Colored Infantry are bur-
that annus mirabilis of a mix like a mojo hand in a blacklaced love glove. ied in Missouri. A prominent white abolitionist publisher, Elijah Parish
History also gave Berry's brinksmanship spirit a shove by dropping Lovejoy, died defending his printing press from racist attackers. One of
his essence down in the "Show-Me" state of Missouri. From a Black per- Lovejoy's young employees was an escapee from slavery named William
spective Missouri historically matters for several reasons~not least Wells Brown, who became one of the first published African American
because for 143 years, from 1702 to 1865, Missouri was a state where novelists and playwrights. Brown's 1853 first novel is titled Clotel; or, The
the institution of slavery was legal. In honor of Mr. Berry's well-known President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. It tells
mathematical acumen I will further report that according to the 1820 the story of a Black woman named Currer who is described as a mis-
census, ten thousand captive African persons lived in Missouri and con- tress of Thomas Jefferson and whose daughter is the book's nominal
stituted one-fifth of the state's population. According to a state audit of protagonist.
1860 the estimated base commodity value of all the enslaved Africans Laws of the time forbade the education of Black children and made
then in Missouri would in today's terms amount to $1,142,838,790, 'This it a fi.neable and jailable offense. But in 1835 an ingenious minister, the
number of course merely reflects the value priced on their human stock Rev. John Berry Meachum, established his Freedom School aboard two
and not the wealth their labor continues to produce through compound steamboats he built himself and anchored in free U.S. government-owned

60 The Black Male Show Charles Edward Anderson Berry 61

 territory in the middle of the Mississippi River. One of the Freedom and not the Afro-Cuban airs that would later compel the creation of
School teachers, Elizabeth Keckley, purchased her freedom in 1854 and Mr. Berry's crossbred Afro-Latin glory "Havana Moon.")
later became First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress in Washington, Josephine Baker, the woman who became variously known as the
DC. Ms. Keckleywent on to write a book titled Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Bronze G;oddess, the Black Pearl, and the Creole Goddess, was born bred
Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House about her experiences. and cornfed in the same town as Mr. Berry in 1906. Ms. Baker certainly
What the compelling, courageous, and ingenious sagas of Lovejoy, set a great precedent for taking a world-class talent that had been honed
Meachum, Wells-Brown, and Keckley tell us is that long before Chuck on the St. Louis scene to international glory. Not to mention fighting in
Berry was a twinkle in his loving parents' eyes, his (and Miles Davis's) the French resistance arid actively supporting the civil rights movement.
regional ancestors in the St. Louis, Missouri, and Alton, Illinois areas, The godmother of African and voodoo dance in America, Katherine Dun-
were courageously and creatively outwitting the slave system and defin- ham, also spent much of her life in the area. About herself Dunham once
ing the pursuit of American scrappiness on their own spirited, renegade, said words that could readily be used to describe Mr. Berry's impact: "I
antiracist terms. certainly feel my career was a great career because it inspired so many
When we read about Chuck Berry's music we often encounter terms many people, literally hundreds of people to follow a new kind of life and
like "hybrid" and "crossover" and "border crossing." This too seems per- to realize that they could make out and advance their own professional
fectly in sync with the state of Missouri itself-the only one in the union and private and social lives." Dunham also said that while she once hoped
that borders a record eight of our nation's other states. The Gateway to the words on her tombstone would read "She Tried," she later realized
the West is a territorial crossroads. It is one of the few places in the they would have to read "She Did It:' Ditto ala Mr. Chuck Berry again. As
United States where the Northern Hemisphere's pre-Columbian Native previously mentioned, jazz's own Prince of Darkness, Miles Davis, arrived
heritage can be visibly seen from across the Mississippi River. The latter in East St. Louis by stork circa 1926. As Miles's daddy was a quite-well-off
bit is thank~ places like Monks Mound-a cosmopolitan construction dentist and hog farmer, young Davis made good his escape from the area
of earth buift"around 1100 BCE that has the same base size as the Great a decade earlier than Chuck Berry. Unlike Miles, though, Mr. Berry has
Pyramid of Giza--,-13.1acres. Like the Great Pyramid, the mound has like- maintained a tight and close connection to his spawning grounds. In this
wise been found to have been built with extreme mathematical attention way he may have also been an inspiration for a young and Princely keeper
given to various astronomy coordinates. A ritual game called Chunky, we of the Berry flame from Minnesota also not known to venture away from
are told, was once played on the mound's plaza. This game involved toss- home for long.
ing spears with a "great deal of judgment and aim" at a chunky stone that Richard Pryor once observed that we only hear about old wise men
was rolled across the field. (Perhaps Chunky had a baby and we can call because a lot of young wise men are dead. As a young adult Chuck Berry
him or her rock and roll too-Ba-dum!) pursued several career paths and passions. Most of these we'd consider
St. Louis history with regards to twentieth-century kulcha before and honest labor; others we'd consider hobbies, a remainder just plain illegal,
after the rise of Chuck Berry will not be undersung tonight either. The carpentry, construction work, auto assembly line, photography, women's
Texas-born Father of Ragtime, Scott Joplin, had great success during beautician school, car thievery, reform school, boxing. Fortunately for us,
his time in the area, both forming an opera company and composing the worst of these options ended in utter disaster and the best were su-
his opera A Guest of Honor. This work celebrated Booker T. Washing· perseded by the far more lucrative returns which early on derived from
ton's 1901 White House dinner with Teddy Roosevelt. This event had his music making.
inspired Black folk and scandalized segregationists everywhere. The Berry's apprenticeship as a club performer in St. Louis found him
self-anointed Father of the Blues, W C. Handy, confessed that the sheet outdrawing Ike and Tina Turner on a regular basis and sharing stages
music he composed for his famous "St. Louis Blues" was based on melo- with the great Albert King. All the real guitar fans here tonight will note
dies he had heard while walking the city's streets. Like some of Chuck that pushing the six-string strangulation envelope seems to have gone
Berry's compositions it freely combines elements from both the blues viral in 1940s and '50s St. Louis. True to his nature as a high-handed
and from south-of-the-border musics of African descent. (In Handy's and sophisticated musical eclectic, Chuck Berry himself provides us
case that music was the Congo-Angolan-derived "Argentinian" tango with a list of key influences that could not be more diverse-Louis Jordan,

62 The Black Male Show Charles Edward Anderson Berry 63

 Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, and the song that was not elegantly funky or just plain rocking those socks
what he generically refers to as "hillbilly music." No artist of any signifi- off. Michelangelo said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and
cance is reducible to a laundry list however. Jorge Luis Borges tells us it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." Mike also declared unto the
that the greatest artists tend to reinvent their influences as much as the heavens, j'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
other way around, and Chuck Berry is no exception. Well, dittcl babe: This is how Papa got a brand new bag and Beethoven
Folk are often given to wonder just what did Chuck Berry do to ren- got rolled in his sarcophagus.
der his music so essential to the bloodstream of twentieth-century (and Berryjs greatest innovation was the entrepreneurially driven rhyth-
now twenty-first-century) popular music. It's no easy thing to give an mic logic that led him to blend the 4/ 4 of boogie woogie with the 2/ 4 of
answer in plain English nor to separate the many moving parts from the hoedown hillbilly music while elocuting his lyrics in a timbre designed to
generous and loving whole. Sensibility tends to be an indivisible thing attract (and then confuse) the country and western crowds who showed
with the artists who endure~everything from shoes to work tools to up to his dances on the side of the tracks and the Mississippi River. That
Cadillacs seems to be of a piece. In the film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, you he did this during Jim Crow nee American apartheid's brutally slow
get the sense that director Taylor Hackford, Keith Richards, and Eric wane was equally rad. As Berry found out when he was booked by Coun-
Clapton all seem confused as to whether Berry knows how great his try and Western promoters on the basis of "Maybellene" and then told
impact has been. And these are perfectly legitimate concerns for guys there was no way in hell he'd be allowed to perform when they saw his
whose young repressed British lives Berry changed forever. This concern face at the door. Heard him knocking but Oh No No No neither he nor
may be a tad off the mark though for the guy whose greatest creation was nobody looking like him could come in.
not his musical oeuvre but Chuck Berry a man in full-the dude himself. We'd argue that the classic 2/ 4 beat we know as the quintessential
(Not to get all anthropomorphic and whatnot but like, dig: If you were engine of rock and roll became the genre's percussive signature because
the Sun how fltuch time would you spend thinking about the light you it rides so comfortably beneath Berry's indelible and immortal songs
cast on the Moon? Just sayin' ... ) on the subject. Those songs remain among the most beautiful products
Befitting his arahitectonic mind-set, that of a man as comfortable in ever conceived in the taboo-defying and transgression-embracing alche-
the world of blueprints and structural designs as on stage, Berry's most mises lab known as American race mixing. Let's take a moment and ac-
influential songs repeatedly do something that only James Brown's do in knowledge how diabolically clever it was of Berry to adapt his music to
my humble estimation: They embed and encode the thermonuclear en- the one beat that already made truckloads of Midwestern and Southern-
ergy of rocking and rolling into highly detailed song forms. This is simply based white Americans feel at home in their own bodies. How brilliant
not true of a lot of music we all know and love. If you learn to "correctly" and commercially correct Berry's instincts were to construct songs that
sing and play a Stevie Wonder song there is no guarantee that you too will grafted his licks, riffs, and sentiments on top of the rhythmically white
sound Wonderful. Leaming "Voodoo Chile" will not transform you into familiar.
a Hoodoo Man or help you acquire a Foxy Lady. And unless you're Nina By the same token this meant some of Berry's best music would not
Simone, figuring out how to play and sing George Harrison's "Here Comes find universal appeal among African Americans who preferred varia-
the Sun" is not necessarily guaranteed to brighten anyone else's day to a tions on 4/ 4 to move and groove to. As dance rhythms go, the Berry-beat
supernova level of luminosity. can look not quite so natural a dance rhythm for even the most adept
If, on the other hand, you learn any James Brown or Chuck Berry of us. You only have to watch the 1973 clip of Berry on Soul Train to see
song note for note, you will find yourself having become funky enough to how much strain the then-best dancers in Black America endured before
funk up a room and your roommates may indeed find themselves rock- freely allowing that hillbilly beat to get up under their skins (http://www
ing and rolling till the break of dawn. Learn to play the bass line to "Cold .youtube.com/watch?v=fT17!Pu8amU).
Sweat" and you will be grooving. Learn to play "Johnny B. Goode" as What Berry only describes in his book as a "hillbilly" beat is also the
originally executed and you will thereafter and forevermore be a rocker. backbone of many Black Pentecostal church services, a version of which
Generous souls that they are, Brown and Berry already did all the we hear on the late sixties R&B/gospel instrumental anthem ''Amen
heavy conceptual lifting for us. They already took everything away from Brother" by the Winstons. The song's four-bar break beat section at 1:26

64 The Black Male Show

Charles Edward Anderson Berry 65
 ,y that group's drummer, Gregory G. C. Sylvester Coleman, later became
Been to Yokohama-fightin' in the war
the basis of UK-bred "drum & bass') or '1jungle" music-another eurhyth-
Army bunk-Army chow-Army clothes-Army car, Nahl
mic genre many a Black American preternaturally obedient to the spooky
Toa much monkey business-A-Tao-too much
chain-gang syncopations of the 2 and the 4 tends to find a tad constric-
tive on the floor (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZuq57-bYM). Bob Dy4'n has said that after he heard Chuck Berry he knew he'd
There is no part of a classic James Brown song that is not funky from never have a day job. Dylan paid his ultimate homages to the King of
stem to stern. This is why hip-hop producers will sometimes only sam- Rockwith the cadence he used to deliver his classics "Highway 61 Revis-
ple James shouting "One!" to make a beat meatier. In the same vein, if ited" and "Subterranean Homesick Blues." "You know poetry is my blood
your intention is to become a rock-and-roll singer, songwriter, guitar- f!ow," Chuck Berry reminds us in Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll.
ist, or performer, the recorded legacy of Chuck Berry, audio and visual, What was also in Chuck Berry's blood flow was free love at a time when
requires only astute mimicry to transfer the feeling of the thing into his fellow darker brethren were being rabidly hung, strung, drawn, and
your own body and transfer that feeling to others. This is why there quartered under mere suspicion of being too free with their love anywhere
are so many gosh-darn rock bands in the world and why once upon a near women of the Caucasian persuasion. As he relates in his memoir
time when young people of Negro origin still played instruments there magnifique, Berry spent nearly four years of his life between trials and in-
were funk bands all across this great land. Because Chuck Berry, like carceration for the alleged crime of sex with white women. Berry is often
Mr. James Brown, is in that rare category of artists I like to call the Body described as one of the first major crossover artists in American popular
Snatchers. Artists with not only the power to possess your soul with music-but we should never forget that what he was crossing over from
their musicality but to dispossess one of all manner of zombie-stiff was a world where Black people and pink-skinned people had to be roped
anxieties, neuroses, and inhibitions. off into segregated sections to prevent physical contact during his con-
Now over i_nhip-hop, there's a thing we call "lyric lovers' rap." Mean- certs. Through no fault of his own otherthan being a Brown-Eyed Hand-
ing rap for t!&e fans of the culture who love the wit of the word sling- some Man, Berry was often the beneficiary of uninvited smooches by
ing as much as the,Ylove those phawnky beats. When you actually parse non-Black audience members. More than once, Mr. Berry had to bees-
the lyrics of songs like "Maybellene" and "Too Much Monkey Business" corted to safety while pitchfork-and-torch-bearing Frankenstein-movie-
you realize Chuck Berry is also one of the godfathers of rap music. You style mobs were forming and frothing to exact a very high price for
want to talk about florid sexual braggadocio and machine-driven rhe- Mr. Berry's charismatic presence. In his autobiography, Berry recounts
torical erotica? Classic Berry rivals any young buck in today's world of one such event occurring on a Meridian, Mississippi, campus where
krunk: he heard one young southern cracker-gentleman tell another, "That nig-
As I was motivatin' over the hill ger asked my sister for a date." Another fellow frat boy whipped out a
I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville. switchblade to underscore his disgust at this fantasy. This vignette ex-
A Cadillac a-ro/lin' on the open road, emplifies what Berry describes as "Southern Hospitaboo," a conundrum
Nothin' will outrun my v8 ford. Berry relates as having puzzled his own father for a lifetime: "Why is it
The Cadillac doin' 'bout ninety-five, so," pondered Mr. Berry Sr., "tbat black hands could knead the dough of
She's bumper to bumper rollin' side by side. the bread that white tongues savored yet blacks could not be favored to
feast at white tables?" For his part, Chuck Berry describes in his memoir
Want to talk about antiauthoritarian militancy in rhyme? Well feasting and savoring from many white tables over the years-especially
younger Chuck B. occasionally sounds like the prototype for Public those set by various southern belles.
Enemy's Chuck D, especially in these lines from "Too Much Monkey We need also add that the lifelong polyamorous Mr. Berry was, as
Business." Kick it Yo. (At this point in the lecture the writer attempts to he reveals in his self-penned book, also a pioneer in the realm of open
recite Berry's "Monkey Business" in a Chuck D cadence over the vocal marriage: His beloved and most devoted wife of six decades, Themetta
album version of Public Enemy's "Shut 'Em Down"): "Toddy" Berry would rank for many an American man (and woman) as a
head-of-the-line candidate for rock-and-roll sainthood.

66 The Black Male Show

Charles Edward Anderson Berry 67
 Toni Morrison points out that one of bulldozed dozens of pieces Holley constructed on land where his
the truly amazing things about the Black experience in America is that grandfather had built an ancestral sixteen-room home in the 1950s.
bestial treatment did not produce a bestial people, The history, generos- After a protracted legal battle the city of Birmingham would eventu-
ity, and charismatic capacity of African American music can be readily ally be made to award Holley $165,700 and relocate his family of fifteen
viewed as a triumph of the civilizing strains of our music over the sav- children to nearby upscale Harpersville, Alabama-much to the chagrin
agery perpetually visited upon our communities. Tony Bennett reminds of his ensconced neighbors there. Despite setbacks, Halley's work was
us that any civilization is judged by what it gives to the rest of the world. exhibited at the White House during Bill Clinton's reign and was chosen
America, he says, can say it gave Louis Armstrong to the world, a state- to represent the United States during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. A
ment to which I'd say Louis, yes Tony, but we need also be as proud that major 2003 retrospectiv~ organized by the Birmingham Museum of Art
we gave 'em Chuck Berry too. Matter of fact, thanks to Carl Sagan em- also traveled to Birmingham, England, that same year.
bedding ''.Johnny B. Goode" in the cosmic archives of earthly civilization The magnificent southern-based African American tradition of mul-
on Voyager 1, we can also say America gave Chuck Berry to the universe. timedia art making Holley belongs to has only recently begun to re-
Roll over my brother Beethoven, tell Lord Sun Ra the news. ceive serious critical attention in the USA. A stellar 2011 Indianapolis
-2014- museum exhibition of Thornton Dial, the tradition's still-productive

t
eighty-nine-year-old grand master, had magazine critics frothing
superlatives like "America's Picasso." A 2002 Whitney Museum show-
Lonnie Holley ing of sui generis nonfigurative quilts by families of women from the
isolated islet of Gee's Bend, Alabama, stunned and delighted New
Like many of old-school R&B's soul tenor voices, Lonnie Holley is really a York art denizens. One prominent scholar of abstract expressionism
preacher. LiJi~any modern shaman worth his salt, he also has own gospel claimed their artistry meant the history of his field would have to be
to spread. vftien we listen to his debut album we can hear echoes of other rewritten.
preaching tenors who know what to do with a bit of vibrato~Aaron Nev- Halley's own voluminous body of work, now housed and still harvest-
ille springs to mi~d, although Halley's celestial roadhouse keyboard work ing fruit in a warehouse compound in Birmingham, is as formidable-
brings to mind Sun Ra in a whimsical mode. Holley's thematics have little formally, conceptually, cross-culturally. The twenty-page booklet enclosed
to do with life among the stars though. In fact, his laments for his fellow in the album contains many sterling examples. Among this writer's fa-
earth creatures are very much about our contemporary seduction by the vorites are "The Music Lives after the Instruments Is Destroyed" from
connectivity bars of our beloved digital devices. 1984, which makes exquisite use of a ruined Gibson SG guitar, ampu-
Lest anyone mistake him for a Luddite without a clue, we should tated saxophone parts, and plastic flowers, and "Keeping a Record of It
mention that Holley too maintains a Facebook page from his perches (Harmful Music)" -an assemblage from 1986 that combines a discarded
in Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, the Magic City where turntable and stylus with a bovine or canine animal skull-and a mon-
he, like Sun Ra, was born and bred. Unlike Ra, Holley left, came back, strous assemblage from 1994, "The Fifth Child Burning," a title which
and stayed-returning to support a humungous extended family that in- also appears on the album in song form.
cluded his own mother's twenty-six other children and his grandmother's All can be seen in the long section on Holley that appears in the mas-
sixty-six grandchildren. Holley has also, since his twenties, done some- sive two-volume Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of
thing else beyond Sun Ra's imagining: established world recognition for the South. About the incident which inspired that sculpture Holley says,
the visionary visual art he continues to produce, against the odds, ob- "Alittle girl in Birmingham had burned to death in her own house .. , .
stacles, and outright hostility he's confronted in the land of his birth. These things in the artwork had all come out of her own burned down
Ironically enough-or perhaps not so ironically, given the history house. Her parents was not home. They had given her luxuries but not
of U.S. Blacks in the "dutty" American South; the city of Birmingham, their own time. Four little girls had died in the bombing at the Sixteenth
in pursuit of airport expansion in the nineties, cruelly and callously Street Baptist Church in 1963. They was the victims of racism. The 'fifth'

68 The Black Male Show Lonnie Holley 69