Hello and welcome to the working songwriter the show where today's best songwriters come to talk shop. I'm your host Joe P. Each episode here we host a distinguished guest and we ask them to go deep,

on their inspiration, on their process, on the general ups and downs of making a life in music.

So whether you're a grizzled veteran,

wondering why no one is paying the asking price on eBay

for your 1997 Parker Fly, or else a scrappy upstart, desperately

searching for the old school marble composition books that don't have those

ugly Manila three section dividers in them.

This is your show, because ultimately it is what every writer seeks most,

an ironclad excuse to put off actually writing.

Hey everybody, it's the last Friday of March 2017,

and before we get to our regularly scheduled program we have a very very

important farewell to bid. The You're going to be here. You're going to. Born. Born Charles Edward Anderson Berry in

Charles Edward Anderson Berry in 1926 Chuck Berry grew up in a segregated middle class neighborhood in St. Louis.

Barry earned a degree in cosmetology and worked for a time as a beautician.

He began playing in local bands in the 1950s, notably a trio led by piano player Johnny Johnson

and eventually Muddy Waters arranged a meeting for him with Leonard Chess of Chess Records in Chicago.

Chuck took an old standard song named Ida Red

and rechristened it, Maybeline. The song made Barry a star, reaching number five on the

Billboard pop chart and number one on the R&B charts. Alan Freed, the DJ widely credited for introducing the term rock and

roll to mainstream radio, put the song in heavy rotation in exchange for a

writing credit. That sort of quid pro quo is now just a

spooky ghost story that songwriters tell their kids at night but it was all too real then, and it became the nation's first

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