Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry, American guitarist, singer and songwriter, was born on October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Chuck Berry is an influential figure and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music.

John Lennon knew where his roots lay: "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'.

According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's website, "While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together."

Cub Koda said, "Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers."

I've been a big fan since I was a teenager and still am. I caught myself spending 2 hours on YouTube watching Berry videos the other day. Pure genius.

Chuck Berry had been playing the blues since his teens and according to the 1987 Taylor Hackford film "Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll,", and used both guitar riffs and grandstanding done earlier by jump blues player T. Bone Walker. By early 1953 Berry was performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio, a band that played at a popular club called The Cosmopolitan, in East St. Louis, Illinois and whose namesake would become Berry's long-time collaborator. Although the band played mostly blues and ballads, the most popular music among whites in the area was hillbilly. 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 began luring larger white audiences to the club. He also began singing the songs of Nat "King" Cole and Muddy Waters. "Listening to Nat Cole prompted me to sing sentimental songs with distinct diction," he said at Blueberry Hill. "The songs of Muddy Waters impelled me to deliver the down-home blues in the language they came from. When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. All in all, it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues."

In May 1955, Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Waters himself, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Berry thought his blues material would be of most interest to Chess, but to his surprise it was an old country and western recording by Bob Wills, entitled "Ida Red" that got Chess's attention. In recent years, Chess had seen the blues market shrink and was looking to move beyond the rhythm and blues market, and he thought Berry might be that artist who could do it. So on May 21, 1955 Berry covered "Ida Red" (renamed "Maybellene") with Johnny Johnson, Jerome Green (from Bo Diddley's band) on the maracas, Jasper Thomas on the drums and blues legend Willie Dixon on the bass. "Maybellene" sold over a million copies, reaching #1 on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart and #5 on the Hot 100.

Buy Posters at AllPosters.com