Chuck Berry, the original name-checker, crams more city names in 1964's "Promised Land" than anyone would think possible and he changes up the pattern. Instead of the more remarkable place names he uses in "Sweet Little Sixteen," Berry chooses places such as Norfolk, Houston, Bolder and of all places, Rock Hill, SC. "Promised Land" isn't one of his more famous tunes, though it follows a Berry-esque pattern. It opens with his signature guitar riff and follows with a break-neck backbeat that is propelled by the base. His solo is vintage Berry, but somehow it's more driven and choppy than twangy and two-step. Still, it's completely Chuck and it's completely Midwestern.
If do you know "Promised Land", you probably know either the Elvis version or the Grateful Dead version. Both Elvis and the Dead, however, turn "Promised Land" into a song about touring, which works very well. The Dead play up the not-so-subtle lines such as "high over Albuquerque" and "California on my mind" to fit their psychedelic trippy persona. And most people if they listen to one of these three versions don't really get the song. Not lyrically at least, because they are too caught up in what Chuck is so good at, making dance music, and his brand is distinctly different from someone like James Brown or Otis Redding. My argument, and it's one endorsed by several critics, is that Chuck is different because he is Midwestern and his music has no direct connection to the church or what Larry Neal defines as black music's central connection. He writes in "A Different Bag" that "black music is essentially informed by a religious sensibility...The emotional energy of the churches shapes and informs black music" (134). There is very little, if any, church in Berry's music. In fact, it's too countrified, too far from the blues. It's too suburban, too quotidian, too white, though Neal credits Chuck for at least being amplified.
Neal and other people just haven't been listening to "Promised Land." A quick survey of the lyrics proves that this song isn't about touring, it's about the African American experience and it's a protest song. Berry writes it in '64, and I don't think I need to provide a synopsis of what was happening in America at the time. The speaker who calls himself a"poor boy" hops a Greyhound and cruises toward the Promised Land of freedom, namely California. He "bypasses Rock Hill," the site of a fierce riot over a sit-in downtown in late '63, and he rides to Birmingham where the bus breaks down. Birmingham, of course, is the city where Martin Luther King, Jr is arrested for parading without a permit and where he composes his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. This city is also where some of the ugliest, most brutal violence is inflicted on protesters who give up their bodies for the cause of equality. Birmingham, the city that Langston Huges writes about, is where martyrs are made, so "the poor boy"'s plea to get the hell out of there and out of Louisiana, a place still rife with racism and poverty, is a plea for his life.
Until he makes it to Houston, where people care about him, the poor boy rides a bus, the cheapest means of transportation available. His choice of a bus also echoes the ways and means of the Freedom Riders and black musicians who, again, risked their lives when they traveled South. Once he gets to Houston, he gets a "silk suit" and "good luggage" and also takes a plane to the West Coast. As the plane touches down, the poor boy is living large, eating a steak and scrambling to call home to say he's "doing all right." Berry, in using the trope of the bus and the city-list, then hearkens to a previous and specifically American trope. He becomes like a pioneer of the 1800s, seeking his prosperity and freedom in the idea of the West. He also echoes an older motif.
The song is titled "Promised Land" which resonates both in the Bible and in America. The ancient Israelites wander the deserts for 40 years, until they find the Promised Land, a place endowed and entailed to them by God, because they were the chosen people. The African slaves forced to America too used the Promised Land to signify their freedom in code songs and in church sermons. The Civil Rights movement picks up the trope too, and in his last formal speech before he is assassinated, King refers to the utopic equality he envisions as the "promised land."
So Berry's tune isn't just the fun dance song or hymn to road trips and touring that the public and the Dead make it out to be. It participates, of course, in a tradition that Berry himself helped forge, the car-as-freedom motif that the Beatles will subsume in "You Never Give Me Your Money." Musically, it's just as driven and tight as any of his other songs, perhaps more so, and Lennon lifts the solo for "You Can't Do That." Neal, who is horrified by the deadness of white culture, calls this musical influence an "insulting parody of the black lifestyle" and believes that "the Beatles joined in the historical bastardization of black art at the hands of white musicians." Though I disagree with some of Neal's stance, what I do see is not a parody of lifestyle, but a borrowing of a motif that Berry invents, and that's part of the subversive rhetoric of rock-and-roll.
Soon after "Promised Land" scores of protest songs flood the radio, including Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" in 1965. Later sixties protest songs include Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Ohio," CCR's "Fortunate Son," Brown's "Say it Loud," Dylan's "Oxford Town" and Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock." Berry helps kick open the door for these artists, to show not just an up-yours mentality to the establishment, but to demonstrate things were not fair for all people in the promised land of America. Neal believes the motivations for white folks in protest songs are "essentially racist." Maybe "Promised Land" does sound completely ridiculous in the mouth of a cracker like Elvis, and the Dead drain it of its subversive power. But, the final image of the poor boy calling back home to Norfolk works like a Biblical prophesy, the future ringing up the past, the backward establishment that crushed people with its blind racist hegemony, to inform them that the dream is actualized and real. The "poor boy is doing fine" and the milk and honey tastes like freedom.
