Fringe Festival 2017!

white clientele by voicing the
different kinds of songs in their
customary tongues.
Consequently, in Chuck’s early days,
many deejays and promoters thought
he was white. In his autobiography, he
tells the story of a promoter outside a
Knoxville venue who told him:
“It’s a country dance and we
had no idea that Maybellene
was recorded by a niggra man.”
They had sold out the place but
couldn’t permit a black person
to perform, as it was against a
city ordinance.
The local white band hired to back
Chuck ended up replacing him.
But even that story, set in the Jim Crow
South, demonstrates the effectiveness
of Chuck’s strategy to pull in the white
audience he desired. Other examples
are easy to find. n a 1 Saturday
Night Beech-Nut Show television
performance, a lip-synching Berry,
unplugged guitar in hand fires up a
bunch of neatly-clothed and wellbehaved
teenagers who giddily clap
their hands. These same teens would
likely have to duck and cover in a
school drill the following day. In an
era where classroom discussions on
the horrors of atomic bombing were
routine, Chuck Berry knew how not
to make his music frightening for
white teens and, especially, their white
parents.
Chuck’s ability to create this magic never
abated as the 1987 bio-documentary
Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll proves. In
the film Chuc erry performs in his
racially mixed hometown of St. Louis.
Camera pans of the audience during
the concert reveal, however, a racially
unmixed crowd.
The same film also shows Chuc
performing in a rehabilitated
Cosmopolitan Club. Decades earlier,
Sir John’s Trio was the house band for
the original venue. Here again the film
shows a racially unmixed audience –
but of a different kind than in the grand
concert and one that is more typical of
East St. Louis. We also see a different
(Cont’d on page F9 )
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