Chuck Berry during a joint concert with Jerry Lee Lewis in Mannheim, Germany, on Nov. 22, 2008. (Ronald Wittek/European Pressphoto Agency)
For 209 months straight, Chuck Berry kept a monthly appointment with his 340 fans in the small Duck Room at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis.
As Blueberry Hill’s owner Joe Edwards tells it, “Chuck and I have been good friends since the early ’80s. One night in 1996 he was reminiscing about the smaller clubs he used to play when he was just starting out and how much he would love to play an intimate club again in contrast to large stadiums. There was a split-second pause. We looked at each other and said ‘Let’s do it.’”