Maybelline wasn’t true for Chuck Berry, but then again neither was Chuck. He died on March 18, 2017. His obit on Billboard gives a fair account of his life, read it here. While the New York Post fills in the details. We are highlighting Chuck’s 1958 publicity shot taken from Rolling Stone’s 500 Best RnR songs of all time — Johnny B. Goode rated number seven.
Themetta and Chuck Barry, 2011. When he died they had been married an incredible 69 years.
Chuck Berry the Chart
There is a great joke in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox at his parent’s high school prom, listening a black group plays, gets sick of the music steals a guitar, goes on stage and plays “Johnny B. Goode.” The next cut is to the ban leader talking to his cousin, Chuck and we hear him saying “You know that new sound you’ve been looking for,” and then puts the phone in the air and lets Chuck hear his greatest hit. Watch it here.
Nice joke from Director Steven Spielberg, but looking at this chart, there is no way that was ever true. Charles Edward Anderson Berry’s (aka Chuck) chart, a bucket that went wild went splish splash into a Locomotive with his Mars on the Seventh House descendant in Taurus opposite his first house, telling us that despite Saturn being there with a strict Baptist background & learning music from travelling with his father’s band, Chuck broke out of that, like he broke out of most molds. He was very much a product of his own fertile imagination and (Pluto as the point focus) zest for all of life.
A locomotive planetary pattern does best with a lot of opposition — sort of the balanced spokes in a wheel and here too, our man Chuck, has three. The first is his balance from Mars to Mercury — a mercurial and sometimes sarcastic turn of the phrase that always ended up being somewhere in a song.
The next opposition is from the Moon in the Creative Fifth House to Ceres in the Tenth and that was an ability to make money from his antics, and create his untrammeled, and sometimes in the case of My Ding a Ling, X-rated music .
The third opposite going from the Fourth House of Home and Family to Career is from Jupiter to Neptune and conjunct Regulus. This is what kept him grounded and probably alive, his beloved & long suffering, Toddy and family life.
Music was an important part of Chuck Berry’s life and the Mystic Rectangle in his chart, a configuration made of four soft aspects and two hard ones in signs that complement each other gives emphasis to that as well. This configuration, made of sextiles and two oppositions, gives the native a strongly balanced and integrated life that bestows not only inner harmony & the ability to bounce back from setbacks, but also the ability to channel all of it into a creative outlet.
Chuck may have toured the world but died in his native Missouri on March 18, 2017. peacefully. Besides Mrs. Berry, he is survived by their four children: Ingrid age 67 born October 1950, Melody, 64 and born in November 1952 Aloha, 57 was born in August 1959 (when Hawaii entered the union so she aptly named), and finally Charles Jr, 55 born in August 1961.