Chuck Berry

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born into a middle-class Black family in St. Louis on October 18, 1926. He gave his first public performance at Sumner High School, but while still a student he was convicted of armed robbery and spent 1944 to 1947 in a reformatory. After his release he worked at an automobile assembly plant and by early 1953, influenced by blues guitarist T-Bone Walker, began performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio. His break came in May 1955 when he met Muddy Waters in Chicago, who sent him to Leonard Chess; Berry recorded "Maybellene" - his reworking of the country song "Ida Red" - and it sold over a million copies, hitting number one on Billboard's rhythm and blues chart. By decade's end he was a star with hit records, film appearances, and his own St. Louis nightclub, but in January 1962 he was sentenced to three years in prison under the Mann Act for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines for sex. Released in 1963, he had more successful songs including "No Particular Place to Go" and the novelty "My Ding-a-Ling" - his only number-one single - but none matched the lasting power of his 1950s work, and by the 1970s he was playing nostal