Chart position: #1 R&B (for 11 weeks), #5 Pop
Category: Countrified R&B
Writers: Berry, Fratto, Freed (later Chuck Berry)
Label and number: Chess Records 1604, Chicago
Flipside: "Wee Wee Hours"
When and where recorded: May 21, 1955, in Chicago
When released: July 1955
Why Important: It was the first pop hit by a black artist that blended
country music with good-time rhythm and blues, and it placed Chess Records,
a blues label responsible mainly for such artists as Muddy Waters and Howlin'
Wolf, in the musical mainstream.
Influenced by: "Ida Red" (1938) and "Ida Red Likes the Boogie" (#10 C&W,
1950), both by western swing's Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and Arkie Shibley's
"Hot Rod Race" (#5 C&W, 1950)
Influenced: Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock" (1957), Elvis Presley's
"Jailhouse Rock" (#1 Pop, 1957) and Berry's own "Nadine" (#23 R&B, 1964).
Answer records: "Come Back, Maybellene" by Big John Greer and Mercy Dee (both
1955)
Important cover versions: Marry Robbins (#9 C&W), Jim Lowe (#13 R&B)
Important remake: Johnny Rivers (#12 Pop, 1964)
The story behind the record: Some rock 'n' roll historians credit a weak,
1955 calypso record, "Oh Maria," by Joe Alexander and the Cubans-featuring Chuck
Berry] (sic) on guitar-as being Chuck Berry's first recording, and David Mattis
of Duke Records in Memphis claimed that Berry recorded some demos with him in
1952, but Berry himself denies both stories. He sticks with the official version:
"Maybellene" was his first time out.
Born October 18,1926, Charles Edward Anderson Berry seemed an unlikely candidate for a teen idol when "Maybellene"-with the help of New York disk jockey Alan Freed, who took his payola in the form of one-third of the song's composer credit-launched his recording career in the summer of 1955. After all, Chuck was a few months shy of turning thirty years old, as well as being a married man with a beautician's license and a couple of kids. But Berry's heart was young. He could write songs about adolescence better than any nineteen-year-old. Just look at "Maybellene," with Chuck's V-8 Ford running against Maybellene's Cadillac Coupe DeVille, engines pumping madly, steaming in the beating rain.
When he picked up the guitar in his mid-teens, Berry cut his teeth on the blues. At his first public performance, in high school, he sang Walter Brown's 1941 hit, "Confessin' the Blues." But like any working musician who wanted a piece of the lucrative action at white clubs, he learned to play standards and country music. "When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter," he said in his autobiography, Chuck Berry. Among his strongest influences were jazzman Charlie Christian (who died young in 1941 after being one of the first guitarists to plug into electricity), Carl Hogan and Ham Jackson (the guitarists in Louis Jordan's jump band, whose huge 1949 hit, "Saturday Night Fish Fry" [see#15]-featuring Jackson-was the prototype for Berry's "Reelin' and Rockin' "), Django Reinhardt, Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, whose distinctive blues licks turned up in several of Berry's songs and subsequently became "Chuck Berry licks." Another mentor was almost surely Floyd Murphy, whose guitar cut through loud and clear on the Sun recordings of junior Parker's Blue Flames-Berry's work on "Maybellene" quotes Murphy's solo on Parker's original 1953 "Mystery Train." In fact, the rhythm of "Maybellene" suggests the rhythm of a speeding train more than an automobile in hot pursuit.
In a talk with writer Danny McCue, pianist Johnnie Johnson remembered that Chuck Berry joined his East St. Louis combo, the Sir John Trio, just after Christmas 1952, and before long he and his guitar replaced the group's saxophonist. "Chuck had more of a flair for showmanship than the fellow he was replacing. Chuck came in there clowning . . . Then he came up with the duck walk and the type of music he was starting to write and all this was different, so it went over big." According to Johnson, Berry was playing shuffle boogies from the beginning. "They were practically patterned all the same. They would just be in different keys."
On the advice of Muddy Waters, whom Berry had approached after one of Waters's shows, Berry drove to Chicago to audition for the Chess brothers, Leonard and Phil, whose record operation at the comer of 47th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue was blues central, home of nearly all the city's top blues acts. He dropped off a tape of a couple of songs that he and Johnnie Johnson had recorded in a St. Louis living room on a $79 tape machine. Johnson and Berry were pushing for an original blues song they'd worked up called "Wee Wee Hours"-"We was proud of that, that was our music," said Johnson-but Leonard Chess was intrigued by a second tune, "Ida May." He invited Berry back for a recording session, but suggested that he change the name of "Ida May" because it sounded too rural. Drawing on his experience as a cosmetician, Berry didn't have to look beyond the Maybelline beauty line for his inspiration, and when he returned to Chicago on May 21 to record in Chess's 80' x 30' studio, "Ida May" was gone. Perhaps fearing legal problems from the Maybelline company, he made a slight change in the spelling.
As Johnnie Johnson remembered it: "It was a western tune that Chuck wrote and we had been playing, but when . . . Leonard Chess heard it, he liked the song, but not the name. There was a mascara box laying on the floor in the comer of the studio and Leonard Chess said, 'Well, hell, let's name the damn thing Maybellene.'" (According to yet another story, Maybellene was the name of a cow in Berry's third grade primer.)
"Ida May" was almost certainly influenced by an old-fashioned square dance number called "Ida Red"-"I'm plumb fool 'bout Ida Red" -a country hit for western swing fiddler Bob Wills in 1938, when Chuck was twelve years old, and reprised by Wills many times afterward; a 1946 version for the Tiffany Music Company features a short guitar solo by Lester Barnard that conceivably could have had some influence on Berry. The verse structure of both "Ida Red" and "Maybellene" are very similar. But Berry makes a considerable change in the refrain of "Maybellene"-so much so that the refrain and verse seem almost from two different songs-and of course the lyrics are pure Chuck Berry.
Berry's "Maybellene" was a car song in a blues tradition that stretched back before Robert Johnson's first record, "Terraplane Blues" (1936), but with modern, hot-rod lyrics that white teenagers could love. Hot-rod songs had been around for at least five years, since Arkie Shibley's "Hot Rod Race" [see #22] spawned a dozen covers and answer records early in the decade, but Berry was the first black performer to fit highway racing into a song. However, "Maybellene" was a novelty for him. His real baby was "Wee Wee Hours," a blues that bears some resemblance to a "Wee Wee Hours" recorded in 1951 by Stick and Brownie McGhee, as well as a couple of T-Bone Walker songs, including "Mean Ol' World" from 1942. "Wee Wee Hours" is the song Berry wanted to establish his name with.
For the session, Leonard Chess made two additions to Johnson's band to fatten the sound: veteran bluesman Willie Dixon on stand-up bass and Bo Diddley's maraca player, Jerome Green. Chess put Green's maracas way out front in the mix, louder than anything else, and yet because of Berry's startlingly fresh guitar work, the listener hardly notices them.
From Berry's stinging guitar intro, which sounds almost like a horn, to the fadeout two minutes and twenty seconds later, "Maybellene" formed a new genre of music. The licks he played on his electric Gibson were basically R&B, but he added a twangy, bright, double-stringed rhythm that gave them a country feel.
He begins with the chorus, in standard AAB blues form: "Maybellene, why can't you be true, oh Maybellene, why can't you be true, you done started back doin' the things you used to do." Then comes the race. "As I was motorvatin' over the hill, I saw Maybellene in her Coupe DeVille, a Cadillac a-rollin' on an open road, nothin' outruns my V-8 Ford." The song ends when he catches her "at the top of the hill."
Still, before "Maybellene" started motorvatin', Chess had to pump a little gas . . . or juice. The Chess brothers had already cut a deal with deejay Alan Freed in New York on their two previous hits by the Moonglows, "Sincerely" (number twenty pop) and "Most of All," by making Freed a co-composer. On "Maybellene," Freed was given one-third of the songwriting credit and royalties (along with Chicago record distributor Russ Fratto, who reportedly sat in on the "Maybellene" session and personally delivered a dub of the song to Freed). In return, Berry got "extra holler for extra dollar" -Fratto pushed the record from his end, and Freed gave "Maybellene" heavy airplay on his influential WINS show. (Berry eventually got back the full copyright to "Maybellene" in 1986.) The song entered the R&B charts in August and stayed in the number one slot for eleven weeks. Its flipside, "Wee Wee Hours," was an R&B hit too. "Maybellene" also laid rubber on its way into the Hit Parade, stalling at number five. Coupled with the success of Bo Diddley, Berry effectively put the traditional, entrenched Chicago blues out of business. Suddenly old blues stalwarts, many of whom were his stablemates at Chess, sounded like yesterday's news.
As a bow to Berry, Elvis Presley, still a relatively unknown Sun Records artist, performed "Maybellene" on "The Louisiana Hayride" country radio show. Johnny Rivers remade "Maybellene" in 1964, as a follow-up to his successful revival of another Chuck Berry song, "Memphis." Both were big hits. More importantly-and more indirectly-the humorous, accessible poetry of "Maybellene" and Berry's subsequent recordings inspired the early hits of the Beach Boys, and his stinging licks, along with his band's heavy rhythm, laid down the prototype of the Rolling Stones' sound.
Berry went on to record a body of music that today is considered the bedrock of rock, and appeared in several films, including Rock Rock Rock and Go, Johnny, Go. In the latter he not only performed but had a speaking role-unusual for rock 'n' rollers in those '50s films-as Alan Freed's sidekick. Later, run-ins with the law sidetracked his career, and although he enjoyed sporadic hits in the'60s and even enjoyed his first number one pop charter in 1972 with a twenty-year-old Dave Bartholomew tune called "My Ding-A-Ling," those recordings lacked the verve and innovation of his early work. Berry himself not only had dried up, but he no longer had the steady backing of Johnnie Johnson's blues band behind him. In retrospect, Johnson's rhythmic piano was almost as important as Berry's guitar. Rolling Stone Keith Richards underscored Johnson's contribution to the Chuck Berry canon when he observed that the early hits, including "Maybellene," were performed in keys more compatible to the piano than to the guitar.
Chuck Berry today, particularly after being the subject of a 1987 film, Hail! Hail! Rock n Roll, is an American icon. His shows are unrehearsed, listless, out-of-tune affairs, painful to listen to if you care about the music, but his audiences don't seem to mind. As long as he struts through oldies like "Maybellene," they feel as if they're witnessing the creation of rock 'n' roll all over again.
"I was liking Chuck Berry when Chuck Berry first came out in 1955. I went to the Boston Garden and saw Chuck do 'Maybellene' and 'No Money Down.' At the time, I said, 'That's what I want to be, there's something about the guy. He only had one record out [but] he stole the show."-Freddy Cannon