Chuck Berry – House of Blue Lights

Chuck Berry – House of Blue Lights – Live, 1986.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry (Chuck Berry) was born, October 18, 1926, in St. Louis, Missouri.

It is impossible to overstate Berry’s importance and influence on early rock ’n roll and its subsequent development into “rock”.

Berry’s musicianship, his showmanship, the cleverness of his wordplay and the topics that he wrote about mark him as one of prime architects of rock ‘n roll.

The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys brought Berry’s music to larger and more diversified audiences than Berry could ever have reached and in turn influenced future generations, but it all comes back to Berry and his guitar –

Recorded late in 1958, it something of a mystery that this number remained in the vault for sixteen years when songs such as ‘Hey Pedro’ and ‘Vacation Time’ were released on 45. This song was one of a number of tracks that first saw release on “Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade, Vol. 3” in 1974.
Willie Dixon plays the double bass and Paul Gayten, nephew of Little Brother Montgomery, who lead top-draw New Orleans orchestras in the late forties, sits in for Johnnie Johnson.

The song is a close cousin to ‘Down the Road Apiece’ (not surprising both were written by Don Raye).

Berry would record ‘Down the Road Apiece’ ten months later, and it was released on the LP “Rockin’ at the Hops” in 1960.