Anti-Climacus

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE (LONG DISTANCE INFORMATION):

Youtube fails here and provides no videos with the Chuck Berry original. With John Lennon will have to do:



Chuck Berry is the preeminent American songwriter, at least in the early rock-and-roll era, and on any sensible person's shortlist for all of American history. His genius comes, first, from the music. Joe Perry, the guitarist for Aerosmith, once identified the signature Chuck Berry sound as a "push-pull:" the rhythm section plays a swing beat, while the guitars play a shuffle. Neither ever fully lines up with the other, which gives the music a tension it wouldn't have otherwise. It's also very difficult to play: everyone has to do their thing and ignore the others; difficult to play, and so unique and identifiable. Even in the Lennon et al. video, they can't quite manage it: the drummer could very easily swing the beat, but is instead just pounding out the beats (the bass player, bless his heart, is really just hitting eighth notes). Most importantly, it's a merging of styles: swing + blues, a combination that works itself out, in a different way, in country-western and Texas swing.

Then there are the lyrics. Berry's songs are self-contained, well-described, drawn from ordinary life but changed ever-so-slightly to be more than matter of fact. "Memphis, Tennessee" has, first of all, a great structure: it's a punch-line song, without being a joke. It comes off, at first, as a typical plight of the man in love, and twists to be a story of (I have always taken it) paternal affection, with something tragic below the surface ("we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree"), but not emphasized.

The song also has one of my favorite images in any song: the "hurry-home drops" in Marie's eyes. Normally I think one shouldn't take a specific word where a general one will do (my reaction to Conrad), but since lyrics are more poetic than they are prose-like, it creates something immediately identifiable and, in its way, unique--one couldn't borrow this expression without dropping it into a context where it fits less well.