CHUCK BERRY

A capable warts-and-all biography of one of the founding fathers of rock ’n’ roll.

Chuck Berry (1926-2017), writes Smith, was a “lifelong tinkerer, one of the great American makers of the twentieth century” who “longed to build something big.” Even though he protested that rock had many origins, he was the great synthesizer, using his profound knowledge of many genres, including and perhaps especially country music, to blend them into a percussive, hip-moving new form. Berry was so knowledgeable a master of country music, then considered the sole province of White musicians, that he was able to correct Ernest Tubb on a rendering of Jimmie Rodgers. Tubb, at the center of traditional country, returned the favor by recording “a more reserved version of Berry’s “Thirty Days,” while everyone from Elvis to Marty Robbins to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles covered Berry as well. Widely admired by audiences White and Black and himself seemingly indifferent to race, Berry still had to endure Jim Crow racism and all that followed. He was even the subject of some resentment among other Black performers, Muddy Waters and Ike Turner among them, who at the time lacked his crossover appeal. Plenty of trouble dogged Berry, much of his own making, as when he transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines for, as the grand jury noted, “immoral purposes” and later videotaped women using the restroom of a restaurant he owned. Smith ventures a little psychoanalysis along the way (“He didn’t feel worthy in some basic sense”), but while dealing with some admittedly sordid and discomfiting matters, Smith always returns to the music, which, of course, was world-changing. On that note, Smith’s book is both a corrective and complement to Berry’s 1987 autobiography.

The best life of Berry in several years, though whether artist and art can be separated will be up to readers.