- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Chuck and His Friends was irresistible to me: a full album of Chuck Berry classics plus two other albums of a wide variety of music from the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Chuck Berry and Others – Chuck and His Friends (1974): Chuck and His Friends was irresistible to me: a full album of Chuck Berry classics plus two other albums of a wide variety of music from the 1950’s and 1960’s. Chuck Berry was the man who is most directly responsible for rock and roll as we know it today. John Lennon was once quoted as saying: “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.” Ted Nugent has said: “If you don’t know every Chuck Berry lick, you can’t play rock guitar.” Besides the usual suspects like “Maybellene”, “Johnny B. Goode”, “School Days”, and “Rock and Roll Music”, the Chuck Berry album includes five songs that are not on his definitive retrospective album, The Great Twenty-Eight: “Via Rock and Roll”, “Bordeaux in my Pirough”, “You Never Can Tell”, “Lonely School Days”, and “My Ding-a-Ling”.
The latter is a bawdy novelty song that is Chuck Berry’s sole Number One hit. If you ask me, that is more of a reflection on the tastes of the record-buying public than on Chuck Berry. The wide range of material on the other two albums is suggested by the opening cut, Billy Stewart’s eccentric cover of the Porgy and Bess show tune “Summertime”. At the risk of naming the entire list of songs, treats to be found here include Little Richard’s groundbreaking “Tutti Frutti”, the Kingsmen’s hit version of “Louie Louie”, “Rescue Me” by Fontella Bass, the original version of the swamp rock classic “Suzie Q” by Dale Hawkins (later recorded by the Rolling Stones and also the first hit song by Creedence Clearwater Revival), “The ‘In’ Crowd” by Ramsey Lewis, the original “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley, Hank Ballard’s “Annie Had a Baby” (a follow-up to his landmark R&B classic “Work with Me, Annie”), “Tequila” by the Champs, two classics by the Platters, “Only You” and “The Great Pretender”, and a trio of girl-group hits: “He’s So Fine”, “Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)”, and “Soldier Boy”.