Song 336: This week on the playlist you can hear Maybellene by Chuck Berry, who also wrote the song. This track seems like a good way to get in gear for starting a new year. During my HS days I knew almost nothing about the first generation of rockers who had created the musical style that my world revolved around, but in the early ‘70s this ‘50s revival came along, filling in a lot of the spaces in that history, and I quickly came to understand Chuck Berry’s pivotal role in getting Beethoven to Roll Over. Berry began his career by motivatin’ over a hill, or perhaps even motorvatin’, as some of his interpreters have suggested. Anyway, he not only caught a Cadillac going a hundred and ten, but he also got himself a chart-topping single on his first outing, with the disc hitting its peak a day after my 4th birthday in September of 1955. While these days the alt-u-right (alternate universe right) tries to tell everyone that only white people are truly creative, the man who wrote Maybellene, Roll Over Beethoven, Johnny B. Goode, No Particular Place to Go, Too Much Monkey Business, and lots of other classics, long ago secured his status as an icon in the real world of Rock and Roll Music.
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