Reflections on “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry

This is a song I played for my students. I think it’s an important song in the development of music because it influenced a lot of other music after it.

When I hear this I’m hearing a chord progression of mainly three chords:

I7 – IV7 – V7

I’m also hearing electric guitar, bass, drums, a vocalist and a piano. Watching performances can help you hear different instruments a little better because you’ll have some guide for what you’re listening for.

I’m also hearing ideas that influenced bands like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Queen, Mumford and Sons, and most modern rock and pop music. That chord progression above is an incredibly common chord progression that’s used in lots of songs. There might be a few more added chords, but those three chords are incredibly common.

There’s a guitar solo in the middle, which is a huge part of rock and heavy metal. Maybe Chuck Berry wasn’t the first person to play a guitar solo. I don’t know who was the first, but it’d surprise me if it was someone that was as late in guitar history as Chuck Berry. Regardless there are musical ideas in the guitar solo that are used by many other bands after Chuck Berry.

Another reason I played it for my students is because Chuck Berry is a black musician. And I agree with Philip Ewell that there are many great musicians of minority groups that are too often left out of music history, which ends up making music history look like the only people making music of any importance to the time were white men, which just wasn’t the case.

I also think it’s important to include black musicians in genres of music that are not thought to have come from black culture. Hip-hop is one genre where it’s common knowledge to have come from black culture. But something like Rock and Roll or even Blues (in some circles) might not be thought to have originated from black culture, though both of those genres did originate from black culture.

And let’s be honest, this song is iconic. A lot of my students knew it. A number of them knew it from the movie Back to the Future, but some of them had heard it from their parents playing music. I also enjoy the different changes. I don’t get bored when I listen to this song. It stays exciting because it has a story being told, and it doesn’t stay in one place for too long. It has a busy texture though so maybe that might not be super enjoyable to you if you enjoy more mellow and sparse music. I personally think this texture is really exciting, especially if done as well as these musicians have done it.

Texture is kind of a weird aspect of music to pay attention to, but it’s the combination of all of the different pieces that are being played at the same time. For example solo violin has a much more sparse texture than this song. This is mainly because there’s only one performer. It would be hard for one performer to make as much noise as five different musicians. But you can think of texture as being how much noise there is, or how many different things are going on. A solo guitar with a singer would also likely have a more sparse texture because there’s only two musicians, but at the same time some solo piano music (especially by Franz Liszt) can have a busy texture. But let’s move on.

There’s a story being told about a kid named Johnny B. Goode who could play guitar really well. He’s also from Louisiana and grew up in the country and didn’t know how to read or write very well. That’s all information given in the song, which might sound strange to say in this way, but the song essentially tells a story.

In that way it’s similar to much older folk songs that have a specific story attached to them. The Odyssey by Homer is thought to have been some type of song or ballad that would be recited to some type of rhythm or music. It didn’t sound like Johnny B. Goode, but it’s a similar idea of telling a story through song.

Take a listen to the song and see if you can hear those different things. Listening in this way makes all music much more interesting to me, so I try to do it with whatever music I might be listening to in that moment.

ISJ