Johnnie Johnson, 80; ‘50s Pianist, Bandleader Gave Chuck Berry His Start

Johnnie Johnson, the St. Louis pianist whose popular early-1950s trio was the launching pad for a young guitarist named Chuck Berry and who played a key role in the sound of Berry’s genre-defining hits, such as “Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” died Wednesday. He was 80.

He died of natural causes, his publicist said. A friend said he had been hospitalized last month with pneumonia and was on dialysis for a kidney ailment.

One of Berry’s best-known songs, “Johnny B. Goode,” was written as a salute to Johnson, whose dynamic keyboard work often played equal partner on recordings with Berry’s stinging guitar licks. Berry was on a flight returning from Europe on Wednesday and was unavailable for comment, a spokeswoman said.

Later in his life, Johnson was championed by Rolling Stones guitarist-songwriter Keith Richards, who included Johnson on his debut solo album, “Talk Is Cheap,” and tour in the late 1980s. Richards also later brought Johnson on tour with the Stones.

Johnson’s contribution to rock’s formative years was recognized in 2001, when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a “sideman” category created for musicians whose work long went underappreciated.

“It always remained curiously fascinating to want to know where those keyboard pounding sounds came from and who was making them,” ZZ Top guitarist Billy F. Gibbons said Wednesday. Johnson incorporated elements “as complex as Duke Ellington’s work to the more bluesy deliveries so popular during the heyday of Chess Records releases in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” he said.

As close as their relationship had been for more than two decades, Johnson sued Berry in 2000, claiming that the guitarist took sole credit for songs they both created. A federal judge dismissed the suit, saying too much time had passed.

Berry disparaged Johnson in his 1987 autobiography, but in 1992 Johnson told The Times, “It didn’t hurt, because it was true. I was a heavy drinker, and it did interfere with my playing. Reading things like that ... brought me out of it.”

Johnson’s group was more than simply Berry’s backup band. This is reflected by the key signatures of many of the seminal Berry hits: Instead of writing them in keys most popular with guitarists, such as A, E and D, many were written and recorded in F, B-flat and E-flat, keys better suited to the horn players Johnson had featured in his combo before Berry joined.

When a saxophonist called in sick for a New Year’s Eve performance in 1952, Johnson took a chance on Berry, who’d been playing guitar professionally for just six months.

“We were doing standards back in that time, and what Chuck came in there doing, this rock ‘n’ roll, it was a novelty thing,” Johnson told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “There wasn’t no black American doing hillbilly music.”

After splitting with Berry, Johnson played with such peers as John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley as well as a younger generation of rockers, including Eric Clapton and Richards.

Johnson and Berry reunited in 1986 for shows marking Berry’s 60th birthday that featured Richards and other rock luminaries and that were filmed by director Taylor Hackford for the 1987 documentary “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘N’ Roll.”

Richards brought Johnson along on his solo tour in 1988-89 as well as with the Stones on their 1989-90 Steel Wheels tour.

With Richards in his corner, in 1991 Johnson released his first solo album, “Johnnie B. Bad.”

Johnson was born July 8, 1924, in West Virginia, where his father was a coal miner. His parents hoped to give him a future different from that of most boys who grew up in Appalachia, and bought him a piano when he was 4.

He took quickly to the instrument, copying songs he heard on the radio by early piano greats Art Tatum and Earl Hines. He developed a sense of rhythm in his playing by mimicking trains that clacked past the family’s home.

He began making appearances on local radio stations when he was 9 and started a band, the Blue Rhythm Swingers, at 13. By age 17, at the outset of the U.S. involvement in World War II, he had a job in Detroit building tanks for Ford Motor Co.

He enlisted in the Marine Corps, becoming one of the first African Americans in that branch, and while serving in the South Pacific played in the Special Service Band for USO shows, often accompanying jazz and big-band greats.

After his discharge in 1946, he moved to Chicago to work in an automobile factory. At night, he took part in the city’s vibrant blues scene, coming into contact with guitarists such as Muddy Waters and Albert King.

He moved to St. Louis in 1952 and took a job at a steel mill, playing evenings with a group he formed there, the Sir John Trio, which Berry soon joined. The band helped Berry create a template for a lyrically sophisticated, rhythmically infectious, harder-driving offshoot of rhythm and blues, soon to be known as rock ‘n’ roll.

The electric guitar licks Berry spun out helped create that instrument’s musical lexicon for a new era, and Johnson peppered those recordings with dazzling fills, percussive support and freewheeling solos on the piano.

“When I heard he’d died, I put on the record of ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ and when I listened to his solo, I just began to weep,” Chicago-bred keyboardist Barry Goldberg, a prominent blues-rock player since the 1960s, said Wednesday. “What he did was so mind-blowing for that time.”

Goldberg continued: “Jerry Lee Lewis did more of the rockabilly thing, that pumping sound. Johnnie incorporated the boogie-woogie style into rock ‘n’ roll. He had all those percussive licks and he did that slide thing [up and down the keyboard]. The combination was really amazing.”

Johnson is survived by his wife, Frances, and many children, stepchildren, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. No services have been announced.