GP's Song of the Day: Chuck Berry

By Graeme Whitfield on Jan 27, 09 02:41 PM

Following on from yesterday's "if you don't like this, you don't like music" theme, here's Brown Eyed Handsome Man by Chuck Berry.

Berry's celebration of the black man is subversive, witty and a great bit of storytelling with six verses crammed into two minutes and 19 seconds. It was originally released as a B-side (to Too Much Monkey Business) and became a posthumous hit for Buddy Holly in 1963.

I first got into Chuck Berry after watching the 1987 film Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, in which Berry celebrates his 60th birthday with two concerts backed by an all-star band.

Keith Richards is in charge of the band and it's fantastic to watch the normally wayward Richards getting increasingly exasperated as an even more mental Berry drives him round the bend. (There's also a great version of Brown Eyed Handsome Man with Robert Cray guesting.)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chuck Berry wrote some of the absolute classics of rock'n'roll (Roll Over Beethoven, Too Much Monkey Business, Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Rock and Roll Music, Sweet Little Sixteen and Johnny B. Goode, to name but a few).

It's slightly galling, then, that his only UK Number One was a terrible song about his penis, My Ding-a-Ling...

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