Escape Velocity

‘There are ten thousand freedoms,’ the late Joshua Clover once said, ‘but rock freedom is definitely set – in the first instance – in a car, when it’s late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless freedom, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.’

Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned 75. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.

There’s a story about the song, too. The demo tape that Chuck Berry gave Leonard Chess included a slow blues, ‘Wee Wee Hours’, and a faster number that Berry called ‘Ida Mae’. Chess wasn’t interested in the slow blues but the up-tempo track caught his ear. He thought the name sounded too rural. They changed it to ‘Maybellene’, inspired by a mascara box lying on the studio floor. Invariably, in the accounts that followed, Berry’s breakthrough was described as a fusion: a country melody played with a rhythm and blues backbeat. A white form electrified by Black energy. Rock and roll, the story goes, was born of that blend.

But country music was already a blend – of string band traditions, blues forms and parlour ballads carried down from Appalachia. Jimmie Rodgers, who’d performed in blackface, kept singing the blues when his make-up came off. Hank Williams sang the blues, too. Western swing, the subgenre most often cited as an antecedent in the ‘Maybellene’ lineage, was itself a hybrid: part jazz, part fiddle breakdown, part dancehall stomp. Here, and elsewhere, the colour line – which was also the line that Johnny Cash walked – got weird.

Bob Wills, the Western swing fiddler and bandleader, recorded ‘Ida Red’ in 1938 and reprised it many times after. In The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, Ed Ward writes that Berry ‘whipped out an old fiddle tune, “Ida Red”, which had been recorded by everybody from Bob Wills to … Cowboy Copas’. In his own History of Rock and Roll, Ward leans more heavily on Copas: Berry ‘probably emulated’ that version because it was more current, and because Copas had supposedly turned the old song into a car chase. (As far as I can tell, there is no Cowboy Copas recording.) In his thorough biography, Chuck Berry: An American Life (2022), R.J. Smith says the song was ‘built on the outline of a country fiddle tune, “Ida Red”, popularised by the Western swing bandleader Bob Wills’.

Wills’s ‘Ida Red’, especially the 1946 Tiffany Transcription, with Junior Barnard on electric guitar, is fantastic: hard-charging and joyous. Lyrically, it’s not much more than a collection of floating couplets: ‘Chicken in the bread pan pickin’ out dough/Granny does your dog bite? No child no.’ There’s no chase, not much of a narrative arc, just momentum and charm. It doesn’t have much in common musically with ‘Maybellene’ either.

‘Maybellene’ is more like Arkie Shibley’s ‘Hot Rod Race’, a talking blues in Western swing clothes. Released in 1950, the song follows a Ford and a Mercury racing ‘side by side’ – phrasing Berry would use five years later. The song spawned sequels and helped fix the open road as a postwar musical staple. But if ‘Hot Rod Race’ gave Berry his frame, Bumble Bee Slim handed him the voice. Slim’s own ‘Ida Red’, which predates ‘Maybellene’ by three years, shares little with Wills’s except for the title. It does have a Ford, a Cadillac and a complaint though, and the tone and the cadence are eerily close, in contour and intent, to Berry’s own.

But ‘Hot Rod Race’ is racially charged, if not outright racist: the singer brags about ‘rippin’ along like white folks might’. An admission, in other words, that the open road was not open to everyone. Slim’s ‘Ida Red’ was the opposite: too Black and too out of the way. Neither fit the narrative. Neither got remembered, and to complicate things further, Berry did take something from Wills: the rhythm. That driving, straight-ahead rhythm in cut time. The official version has Berry laying a ‘blues’ backbeat under a country melody. In reality, the melodic elements drew on the blues; the rhythm on Western swing. It’s the exact inverse of what we’ve been told.

Berry was doing something far stranger and sharper: not meeting in the middle but cutting across. Getting that wrong means missing the point of the record, not just where it came from but what it was trying to do. And did. It trains us to hear the same way, but genius moves faster than whatever boxes we’ve built to contain it.