Chart entered : 21 June 1957
Chart peak : 24
Number of hits : 11
With due respect to Fran Beecher of the Comets the chart got its first great guitarist when Chuck put down his marker.
Already in his thirties , the former Charles Berry was born in Missouri to comfortably off parents. Despite this he was arrested for taking part in an armed robbery when he was 18 and incarcerated from 1844 to 1847. While working in a variety of jobs Chuck gradually built up a reputation as a live performer and in May 1855 was invited to record for Chess Records. His first record "Maybelline" an adaptation of a country song transformed into a cars and girls anthem for teenagers. Subsequent singles "Thirty Days" and "No Money Down" were more bluesy and consequently stayed in the R & B charts. It was "Roll Over Beethoven" that cast him irrevocably as a rocker and the two singles that preceded this one, "Too Much Monkey Business" and "You Can't Catch Me " stayed in that vein.
"School Day" starts with his most familiar riff ( because he re-used it on "No Particular Place To Go" ). It describes the pressures faced by the American school kid in the first half of the song then goes on to espouse the liberating force of rock and roll as experienced by visiting the local juke joint after school. The last verse beginning "Hail Hail Rock and Roll / Deliver me from the day of old" ( represented by the seemingly irrelevant subjects in verse one ) is almost a hymn. Berry's guitar comments on the lyric throughout the song with great style providing the blueprint for at least the next two decades of rock.
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