When the late Chuck Berry's family members get together to play music, they sometimes have to weigh their desire to find the right sound against the importance of historical preservation.
In a St. Louis recording studio earlier this month, Chuck’s son Charles Berry Jr. started warming up with one of his legendary father’s guitars. When his son Charles “Charlie” Berry III walked over and plugged in his own guitar, the younger Berry didn’t like what he saw.
“Don’t use that one,” Berry III told his father, “it’s a family heirloom.”
Berry Jr. stuck with his choice, and a band made mostly of Chuck Berry’s family members and longtime bandmates — What the Chuck! — worked up a version of the music legend’s Christmas classic “Run Rudolph Run.”
The recording is one early piece of CHUCK100, a two-year project of recordings and events that will celebrate Berry’s music in advance of the 100th anniversary of his birth in October 2026.
The version of “Run Rudolph Run” by What the Chuck! will anchor an EP, due in December, combining the group’s lightly updated take on Berry’s classic sound with covers by other St. Louis-based artists, interpreting the song in their own divergent styles.
The Berry family released the first EP in the series, including five wildly different versions of the 1964 hit “You Never Can Tell,” on Oct. 18, which would have been the 98th birthday of the father of rock ‘n’ roll, who died in 2017. They plan to release additional EPs, each one focused on a different Berry classic, every three months.
“We just want to keep my dad's music alive,” Berry Jr. said in a side room of the St. Louis Recording Club, producer Carl Nappa’s studio on the Hill. “I've listened to my dad's music my entire life, and I've loved it my entire life. And to be able to participate in something like this is just icing on the cake to me.”
Berry Jr. played guitar in his father’s band for 14 years, touring the world. In addition to the father/son duo guitar of Berry Jr. and Berry III, What the Chuck! includes Chuck Berry’s grandson Jahi Eskridge, a trombonist and vocalist; bassist Terry Coleman; pianist Antonio Foster; and Keith Robinson, who played drums in Chuck Berry’s band for about a decade, including monthly gigs at Blueberry Hill in the Delmar Loop. Themetta Berry, Chuck’s widow, is intimately involved and the final arbiter of recordings to be included in the project.
“Hopefully that the younger generation will learn about Chuck, especially our young Black youth, learning the history of rock ‘n’ roll and where it comes from,” Robinson said in the studio control room shortly before the first “Run Rudolph Run” session. “Be aware of that good, old rock ‘n’ roll that you can learn from.”
The “You Never Can Tell” EP includes a string arrangement of the song by Mark Hochberg; a New Orleans-spiced interpretation by Playadors with vocalist Steve Ewing; a slow-cooking, funky meander by Mattie Schell; and the soul-funk fusion of Fat Pocket, with Eskridge singing his grandfather’s lyrics.
When Nappa called Schnell to invite her participation, she was eager to participate but not immediately sure the project was a natural fit.
“At first I was really nervous because I was thinking, how am I going to do a version of Chuck Berry that’s respectable? But when Carl said he wanted totally my own version, that took some nervousness away,” Schnell said. “They’re not expecting me to sound like Chuck.”
A separate musical project planned for CHUCK100 is a tribute album by national and international artists to be produced by Lawrence and Yves Rothman. The Berry family and its partners plan displays of Berry memorabilia and an upcoming collaboration with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
The Berry family also is working with Revelations Entertainment — a production company founded by Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary — which optioned the rights this month to Chuck Berry’s life story. The team is developing a drama series that would trace Berry’s progress from St. Louis to worldwide stardom.
For Berry’s family and musical partners, CHUCK100 offers a chance to reconnect with a legendary music catalog and display its enduring relevance.
Eskridge doesn’t have the experience playing Berry songs that his uncle and cousin do — Berry III wasn’t a full-time band member but did get the chance to play with his grandfather — so the EP series offers a special opportunity to align himself with the family’s musical lineage.
“I listened to him my whole life but never really entertained the idea that I’d be engaging in the legacy of it. It's awesome now to be able to watch the knowledge get filtered down to us, and to share something with my family,” Eskridge said. “This is foundational American music, and it can be taken anywhere.”
