No.34 - August 2024
My Nobel Laureate
Much controversy ensued a few years ago over the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan, with many kvetching that a songwriter was hardly qualified to sit at the Literature’s head table with the likes of Toni Morrison and Alice Munro, Tomas Tranströmer and Kazuo Ishiguro. Jesus himself, not that he would necessarily have been invited to become a Nobel judge, might have agreed with those doubters, because, after all, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.” – That is, until he was schooled by the woman from Canaan, who reminded him. “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Then he would have seen the light.
I’m with Jesus and the woman from Canaan and the Nobel committee, and I liked the Dylan award.
Others grumbled that it should have been so-and-so, the most frequent so-and-so being Leonard Cohen, but after all, it wasn’t a Grammy award. The choice wasn’t between Dylan and other deserving songwriters.
But if the Nobel committee had been tasked to choose a deserving literary figure from the ranks of English-language songwriters – or even if they hadn’t, if they had been simply going about their business choosing a someone of outstanding merit who had significantly contributed to world culture, and they had asked me and Jesus, I like to think we would have agreed on the same name.
Chuck Berry.
John Lennon famously said that if rock and roll were to be given another name, it would be Chuck Berry, but I would argue that his significance goes even farther than that. More than a back beat you can’t lose it, Berry’s language skills, storytelling ability, and his vision of America, particularly Black America, place him in the first rank of American authors, and give him an entrée to the world stage.
So this month, I’ll take a little tour of Berry’s oeuvre, starting with his first recorded song, “Maybellene,” which is in the Anglo-American folk tradition of ballads about a competition. The tradition is as old as Homer, and in the English language or its predecessors, as old as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf and Grendel, but competition didn’t always have to be to the death. For the Greeks it could be anything from sport to beauty, but a race, generally with marriage to a princess as the prize, was always a good one, from Atalanta and Hippomenes to Idas and King Evenus, with the hand of the beautiful Marpessa at stake.
Horse races have always been a staple of the folk ballad tradition, as in the 18th century Bodleian Broadside collection, with its story of Skewball:
You Gentlemen Sportsmen I pray listen all
I'll sing you a song in the praise of Skewball
And how they came over you shall understand
By one Squire Irvine the Mell of our land.
500 bright guineas on the plains of Kildare
I'll bet upon, Sportsmen, that bonny-grey mare
Skewball hearing the wager, the wager was laid
He said loving master, its don't be afraid...
Which was carried into the 20th century by Lead Belly, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, but in all of them, the heroic Skewball, or Stewball, beats that gray mare.
The 20th century brought a new kind of chariot, and a new archetype, the hot rod race, and surely Maybellene rivals Atalanta or Marpessa, fickle though she may be. Berry loves words as much as he loves Maybellene, and if an appropriate one doesn’t exist, he’ll invent one, as in “Maybellene,” where he’s motorvatin’ over the hill.
Helen Vendler, in a essay, tells us that “Fin-de-siècle writing suggests seriousness and flamboyance, hyperbole and arbitrariness. The notion of fin de siècle presents itself to reflection as unsuitable for lyric, since it derives from the time span of epic narration, and lyric generically prefers the brief moment to the narrative span. The primary formal problem for the writer of lyric who wishes to invoke the notion of history is how to tuck such a panoramic concept into a short-breathed poem.” She opens the essay with examples of how some writers have addressed the problem:
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophe. —Theodor Adorno,
Minima Moralia, “Dwarf Fruit”
Except for us, The total past felt nothing when destroyed. —Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye Rome! —W. B. Yeats, “Meru”
She’s deep into the lateness now. —Jorie Graham, “History”
But for seriousness and flamboyance, hyperbole and arbitrariness, and the tucking of a panoramic concept into a single line, how can she have forgotten “Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikowsky the news”?
Berry was a master of the one-sentence short story, and of creating mini-anthologies of such stories, as in his song, “Too Much Monkey Business,” where he gives us the frustration of modern life as seen by a millworker living paycheck to paycheck; a housewife assaulted by a slick-talking salesman; a young man being hustled into marriage he’s not ready for (and a career he’s not ready for; she wants him to “write a book”); a schoolboy; a frustrated pay telephone user (Mike Nichols and Elaine May elaborated on the same plot; a GI dealing with the everyday bureaucracy of army life, even in the middle of World War II; and finally back to the Everyman living paycheck to paycheck, this time working in a gas station.
Berry’s mini-anthologies have roots in three traditions. There’s the mid-century American short story collection with a thematic thread, like Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Salinger’s Nine Stories, or Alston Anderson’s Lover Man. Then there are two traditions going back to Africa, where I suspect a better scholar than me could find a link. There’s the blues, with its rhymed couplets (with one line repeated), tied together by musings about sexuality, work or escape, or possibly the suggestion of a plot. And the ghazal, with its beginnings in 7th century Arabia but spread through the Islamic world, with its discrete two-line vignettes held together by a key word.
“Too Much Monkey Business” is an anthology of contemporary postwar America. “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” the flip side of the same 1956 45 RPM single, is another collection of sharply observed vignettes of contemporary life, again strung together with a ghazal-like refrain, but this time the focus is a little different. Another literary device is added to the ones already mentioned, the African-American tradition of signifyin’, or making a point through indirection. In this case, the subject matter of the vignettes is the postwar urban African-American male, and his listeners did not need to be told more explicitly who the brown eyed handsome man was.
But Berry’s view of his contemporaries carries a unique world view. He makes use of another American folk-literary tradition, the one Sharon Olds calls “the language of the brag” (“some American achievement / beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self”). In this case the brag is largely, though not exclusively, a familiar theme of both the blues and the ghazal – sexual triumph. But the brown eyed handsome man is a lot more than the blues/ghazal’s sexual victor. He begins with the hero in a situation all too familiar to the Black American – “arrested on charges of unemployment,” freed because his magnetism proves irresistible to the judge’s wife.
But then the milieu widens. Berry’s hero is not a field hand, not even a struggling survivor of the Great Migration, adapting to the city but still relying on the mojo hand to ward off the evil eye. This brown eyed handsome man is a world traveler, flying in a TWA. He’s educated – he has a casual familiarity with Milo’s Venus that Charley Patton or Sonny Boy Williamson would never have. He can compete for the hand of Beautiful Daughter with a doctor and a lawyer, and win. And his ultimate heroic act moves beyond the realm of sexual competition, and beyond the realm of archetype, to become real, with a real act of heroism: he becomes Jackie Robinson, the brown eyed handsome man who wins the game with a home run in the ninth inning.
We see the brown eyed handsome man, the man whose cultural sophistication enables him to take control of the situations of contemporary life, in another song. Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, two white men who had an uncanny ability to write from a black perspective, gave a warm-hearted but slyly satiric portrait of a Black man “Shopping for Clothes,” still enough of a rube to be the victim of the system. Berry, this time creating a first person narrator, is coolly on top of the system shopping for a Cadillac in “No Money Down,” not only knowing exactly what he wants, from the consumer savvy (“a Continental spare and Y-chrome wheel”) to the hilariously fanciful (“a full Murphy bed in my back seat” and an engine that burns “aviation fuel, no matter what the cost”), but also knowing all the ins and outs of financing his four-door DeVille.
Of all the powerful, impassioned, brilliant Black voices that held a mirror up to the community they were part of, no one else created a role model quite like Chuck Berry. I’m quite sure the Nobel judges read this column faithfully (don’t they, Jim?) and this will give them something to think about. It’s unfortunately too late to award the prize to Berry, but now they know what they missed.
©2024 Tad Richards
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