The Chuck Berry Top 25 Countdown (#25-21) & This Week's Statistics

Yesterday, while I was taking a shower (my favorite time for inspiration and planning), I thought I could do a best-of list for Jimi Hendrix. Then I checked out YouTube and I realized that Jimi's songs were even harder to come by on YouTube than those of Dylan and the Beatles. So, not wanting to face the aggravation of not finding the right versions of the songs in question, I abandoned the idea. Then came the sad news of the death of another of the greatest guitarists and all-around Rock'n'Roll personalities of all-time, Chuck Berry. So, in his honor, I compiled a list of his Top 25 songs (imo) and will start presenting them today.

Berry was born the son of a deacon in a middle-class neighborhood of St Louis in 1926, and picked up the guitar in high school, playing at parties and developing his flourishes as a performer. He later said that it was during childhood that he began his signature dance, eventually dubbed “the duck walk” for its bent knees and stutter step.

As a teenager he was arrested for attempted robbery and served three years in reform school, after which he worked in an assembly line at a General Motors factory.

He turned to music full-time in the 1950s, when he formed a trio with a drummer, Ebby Harding, and keyboardist Johnnie Johnson, with whom he rose through St Louis clubs while working on the side as a hairdresser.

His break came in 1955 when he met blues musician Muddy Waters and producer Leonard Chess in Chicago, and for the rest of the decade Berry blended the Country and Blues songs of the South with Pop sensibilities starting to echo on the radio.

He had hits, but none as big as his white counterparts of the day. Yet his influence, especially on all the major bands of the British Invasion of the 60s, was greatly felt.

“It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry ’cause I lifted every lick he ever played,” Keith Richards said. “This is the gentleman who started it all, as far as I’m concerned.”

"If you had to give Rock 'n' Roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry", John Lennon had stated.

As an extra, here's a song just outside the Top 25: Sweet Little Rock and Roller.

Let's begin our countdown with the song at #25, Tulane: Berry returned to Chess Records after years at Mercury with his 1970 album Back Home, and its standout track is one of his great later gems. With a taut, rollicking riff, Tulane is a funny, detailed story song with timely lyrics about a pair of hippie pals who run a "novelty shop," specializing in "the cream of the crop." When the place gets busted and one of them ends up in "a rotten, funky jail," they're able to call in "a lawyer in the clique of politics" to get the whole thing fixed. In a simple, fun two-and-a-half-minutes, Berry is able to poke loving fun at the counterculture he helped create while pointing out some light American class hypocrisy.  

At #24 we find Nadine. It was recorded at a November 1963 session at the Chess studio in Chicago, his first after his release from prison. According to Allmusic, the song had a "profound influence" on the songwriting of Bob Dylan: "One need only listen to Nadine (Is It You?), released in February 1964, and then to the 1965 Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home, with its surreal story-songs, to hear the similarities."

At #23 is Wee Wee Hours. It took Berry only about an hour, by his own estimation, to write Wee Wee Hours, the bluesy B-side to Maybellene. His inspiration for the song was bluesman Big Joe Turner's smooth Wee Baby Blues, a romantic declaration of love at first sight – "I was in love with you, baby/ Way before I learned to call your name," Turner sang. Similarly, Berry's song is a tribute to a woman named Margie he met and fell in love with as a teenager when he was playing music for the USO. "In a wee little room, I sit alone and think of you," he sings. "Blues are simple and only seem to need the lyrics of a lonely confession to be put to music," he wrote of the song in his autobiography. "It took the memory of one of the evenings that I didn't get to see Margie at her window to put the words together and the tune is anybody's cry for companionship."

Sitting pretty at #22 is Promised Land. Berry’s gift reached its apogee in Promised Land, probably the finest song ever written about the American dream. A modern Odyssey, it describes a journey from Norfolk, Virginia to Hollywood by Greyhound bus, Midnight Flyer train and jet plane, giving details of family favours bestowed on the “po’ boy” en route (“They bought me a silk suit, put luggage in my hand”) and the wonder of in-flight meals (“Working on a T-bone steak a-la-carty”) before the magic moment arrives: “Swing low, chariot, come down easy / Taxi to the terminal zone / Cut your engines and cool your wings / And let me make it to the telephone.” When Elvis Presley recorded it at the Stax studio in Memphis in 1973, the former truck driver sounded like a man who had lived the song: “Tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling / And the po’ boy is on the line.”

Finally for today, at #21, we find Down Bound Train: A bluesy allegory for sin with a locomotive rhythm-guitar line, Down Bound Train reflected Berry's deeply held religious beliefs. The lyrics describe a person who drank so much that he passed out only to awaken on a train lit by a brimstone lamp and barreling through sulphuric fumes – the engineer was "the Devil himself." "I could say my father, in many ways, really wrote the foundation for Down Bound Train in his constant preaching of the horrors of hell once you've missed the blessings of salvation and heaven," Berry wrote in his autobiography. "So let it be known that I'm not alone to reap what I've sown in fire and brimstone because of my own bad traits that I've shown." He added that he still got a chill when he heard the song.

Now, let's talk about our blog's statistics; this time we'll have an added bonus for you. You see, last week this blog has celebrated a year of existence (happy birthday to us!) Being in Paris at the time, it wasn't possible to celebrate properly, so, let's do it now, only a week later. The bonus is a list of the most visited and the least visited topics within this year. We'll start with the ten least visited and work up to the most visited. Here goes:

The least visited entry is R.E.M. part 5. Since R.E.M. is among my 10 all-time favorite groups, this naturally makes me sad. Perhaps expanding their presentation to 6 parts was a mistake...

Just two visits more for the next one; although it wasn't really a proper entry: I decided to share a version of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother with you, without any history. I guess you all missed my gift of gab.  😃

Just one visit more for the combined presentation of Mary Lambert, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. I gave you two acts for the price of one, but still...

Three posts are tied for position #4: part 1 of The Smiths (another group that I really like), as well as TV Themes & Statistics from June 13 and The Rolling Stones Top 75 Countdown from September 25.

At #7 and at #8, we find R.E.M. part 3 and R.E.M. part 4. Only the first part of the R.E.M. presentation received a satisfactory number of visits. Unfortunately.

Tied with R.E.M. part 4 at #8 are Little Mix and Bola de Nieve. As hard as I try, I can't find a connection between these three: the group that defined Alt. Rock in the 80s vs. a contemporary British girl group vs. an obscure Cuban musician whose biggest moment came over 50 years ago. Go figure.

... Now to the most visited: Just outside the Top 10, at #11, there's a tie between Scott Walker part 2 and the first day of presentation of this year's Oscar eligible songs.

At #10 is another Oscar-related post: The Oscar-winning Songs Countdown: 1977.

At #9 we find Rod McKuen and at #8 there's Dave Clark. At #7 is the most visited movie-related post: The Oscar-winning Songs Countdown: 1967.

At #6, in an amazingly short time, we find our very last subject, Ben McGarvey, otherwise known as Minute Taker. This makes me especially happy, since not only was the man kind enough to privately thank me for my post, he also put the link up on his FB page, saying great things about it. Once again, thank you Ben!

Ben McGarvey is just a breath away (one visit!) from the guy at #5, who is Donovan. Ben will probably soon overtake him and may possibly overtake #4 & 3... Which are, the surprise from Greece, Domna Samiou (Δόμνα Σαμίου), at #4 and the first part of the George Michael presentation at #3.

At #2 is Labi Siffre, the British / Nigerian / Barbadian / Belgian singer-songwriter.

Finally at #1, a position that was obtained after his sad death, is the second part of the George Michael presentation - the one that focuses in his less well-known, later career.

To put things into perspective, George Michael part 2 was visited 10 times as much as the Labi Siffre post, more than 20 times as much as the George Michael part 1 post, and exactly 758 times as much as the R.E.M. part 5 post.

Now to our usual statistics: this week's big winners were the United Kingdom, followed by the United States and then Italy and Cyprus. France and the Netherlands remained stable, while Greece, Germany, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates suffered losses. Canada and Spain continue to do very well, and so does Australia. Here are this week's Top 10:

1. the United States

2. the United Kingdom

3. France

4. Greece

5. Canada

6. Italy

7. Cyprus

8. Spain

9. Germany

10. Australia

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Côte d'Ivoire, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Ghana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

Here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 52.7%

2. Greece = 9.6%

3. Germany = 6.6%

4. France = 6.0%

5. Russia = 5.2%

6. the United Kingdom = 3.5%

7. the United Arab Emirates = 1.12%

8. Italy = 1.08%

9. Cyprus = 0.82%

10. the Netherlands = 0.65%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!