Chuck Berry Biography, Death, Wife, Children, Net Worth And More

Chuck Berry Bio

Chuck Berry was an American singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music, making him a major influence on subsequent rock music. He was born on October 18, 1926, in St. Louis, Missouri, the U.S with the full name Charles Edward Anderson Berry.

With songs such as “Maybellene”, “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Rock and Roll Music” and “Johnny B. Goode”, Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive. He wrote lyrics that focused on teen life and consumerism, developing a music style that included guitar solos and showmanship.

Chuck Berry was the fourth child in a family of six. He grew up in the north St. Louis neighborhood known as the Ville, an area where many middle-class people lived. His father, Henry William Berry, was a contractor and deacon of a nearby Baptist church while his mother, Martha Bell, was a certified public school principal. Berry’s upbringing allowed him to pursue his interest in music from an early age.

He gave his first public performance in 1941 while still a student at Sumner High School. In 1944, Chuck Berry was arrested for armed robbery after robbing three shops in Kansas City, Missouri, and then stealing a car at gunpoint with some friends. Berry’s account in his autobiography is that his car broke down and he flagged down a passing car and stole it at gunpoint with a nonfunctional pistol. He was convicted and sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, near Jefferson City, Missouri, where he formed a singing quartet and did some boxing. The singing group became competent enough that the authorities allowed it to perform outside the detention facility. Chuck Berry was released from the reformatory on his 21st birthday in 1947.

After his release, Chuck Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of the blues musician T-Bone Walker, Berry began performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955 and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess, of Chess Records.

With Chess, he recorded “Maybellene”—Berry’s adaptation of the country song “Ida Red”—which sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard magazine’s rhythm and blues chart. By the end of the 1950s, Chuck Berry was an established star, with several hit records and film appearances and lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis nightclub, Berry’s Club Bandstand.

Nevertheless, Chuck Berry was sentenced to three years in prison in January 1962 for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines. After his release in 1963, Berry had several more hits, including “No Particular Place to Go”, “You Never Can Tell”, and “Nadine”. But these did not achieve the same success, or lasting impact, of his 1950s songs, and by the 1970s he was more in demand as a nostalgic performer, playing his past hits with local backup bands of variable quality. However, in 1972 he reached a new level of achievement when a rendition of “My Ding-a-Ling” became his only record to top the charts. His insistence on being paid in cash led in 1979 to a four-month jail sentence and community service, for tax evasion.

Chuck Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986. He was cited for having “laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance.” Berry is included in several of Rolling Stone magazine’s “greatest of all time” lists; he was ranked fifth on its 2004 and 2011 lists of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll includes three of Berry’s: “Johnny B. Goode”, “Maybellene”, and “Rock and Roll Music”. Chuck  Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” is the only rock-and-roll song included on the Voyager Golden Record. He was nicknamed by NBC as the “Father of Rock and Roll”.

Chuck Berry Death

On March 18, 2017, police in St. Charles County, Missouri, were called to Berry’s house, near Wentzville, Missouri, where he was found unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at the scene, aged 90, by his personal physician. TMZ posted an audio recording on its website in which the 911 operator can be heard responding to a reported “cardiac arrest” at Berry’s home.

Chuck Berry’s funeral was held on April 9, 2017, at The Pageant, in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. He was remembered with a public viewing by family, friends, and fans in The Pageant, a music club where he often performed, with his cherry-red guitar bolted to the inside lid of the coffin and with flower arrangements that included one sent by the Rolling Stones in the shape of a guitar. Afterward, a private service was held in the club celebrating Berry’s life and musical career, with the Berry family inviting 300 members of the public into the service.

Gene Simmons of Kiss gave an impromptu, unadvertised eulogy at the service, while Little Richard was scheduled to lead the funeral procession but was unable to attend due to an illness. The night before, many St. Louis area bars held a mass toast at 10 pm in Chuck Berry’s honor.

One of Chuck Berry’s attorneys estimated that his estate was worth $50 million, including $17 million in music rights. Berry’s music publishing accounted for $13 million of the estate’s value. The Berry estate owned roughly half of his songwriting credits while BMG Rights Management controlled the other half; most of Berry’s recordings are currently owned by Universal Music Group. In September 2017, Dualtone, the label which released Berry’s final album, Chuck, agreed to publish all his compositions in the United States.

Chuck Berry Wife

On October 28, 1948, Berry married Themetta “Toddy” Suggs, who gave birth to Darlin Ingrid Berry on October 3, 1950. Chuck Berry supported his family by taking various jobs in St. Louis, working briefly as a factory worker at two automobile assembly plants and as a janitor in the apartment building where he and his wife lived. Afterward, he trained as a beautician at the Poro College of Cosmetology, founded by Annie Turnbo Malone.

Chuck Berry was doing well enough by 1950 to buy a “small three-room brick cottage with a bath” on Whittier Street, which is now listed as the Chuck Berry House on the National Register of Historic Places. By the early 1950s, Chuck Berry was working with local bands in clubs in St. Louis as an extra source of income. He had been playing blues since his teens, and he borrowed both guitar riffs and showmanship techniques from the blues musician T-Bone Walker. Besides, Chuck Berry took guitar lessons from his friend Ira Harris, which laid the foundation for his guitar style.

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. Chuck 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.

Children

Chuck Berry announced on his 90th birthday that his first new studio album since Rockit in 1979, entitled Chuck, would be released in 2017. His first new record in 38 years included his children, Charles Berry Jr. and Ingrid, on guitar and harmonica, with songs “covering the spectrum from hard-driving rockers to soulful thought-provoking time capsules of a life’s work” and dedicated to his beloved wife of 68 years, Toddy.

Net Worth

Chuck Berry was an American musician, guitarist, singer, and songwriter whose music placed him on the list of American celebrities. He had a net worth of $10 million at the time of his death.

Chuck Berry Facts

♦ The melody of The Beach Boys’ classic ‘Surfin’ USA’ is almost identical to the melody of Chuck’s 1958 classic ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. They sounded so alike in the fact that The Beach Boys had to give Berry co-writing credit in order to avoid a lawsuit.
♦ Chuck Berry once opened a restaurant called The Southern Air in Missouri. According to a former waitress, Berry wired the women’s toilets with a video camera and recorded some two hundred unsuspecting patrons using it.
♦ In December 1959 Berry invited a fourteen-year-old Apache waitress Janice Escalanti to work as a hatcheck girl at his nightclub.

♦ Starting young, Chuck sang in his St. Louis church’s Baptist choir at age six.
♦ Ever the food lover Chuck loves to eat the following: beef, seafood, peaches, home fries, candied yams, chili, grape soda, orange juice, Snickers bars, and Dutch apple pie.
♦ Between 1948 and 1955, Berry worked as a janitor at the Fisher Body auto assembly plant, trained to be a hairdresser at the Poro School, freelanced as a photographer, and assisted his father as a carpenter.

♦ Chuck got the moniker ‘Johnny’ from Johnnie Johnson, a pianist who collaborated with Berry on many songs, including ‘Maybellene’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’.
♦ Chuck’s famous ‘duck walk’ dance – as imitated by Marty McFly in the ’80s classic Back To The Future – originated in 1956, when Berry attempted to hide wrinkles in his rayon suit by shaking them out with his now-signature body movements.
♦ Due to being burned early on in his career, and occasional run-ins with the IRS, Chuck always gets paid in cash.
♦ Whenever he performs live, Chuck Berry picks a venue near an Indian restaurant.

Chuck Berry Songs

To get to know all of the live albums, compilation, and studio albums as well as songs, soundtracks, and EPs recorded by Chuck Berry, simply see here.

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