‘Chuck Berry: An American Life’
By R.J. Smith
Hachette Books, 432 pages

‘Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon’
By Greg Laurie
Salem Books, 256 pages

Often hailed as the inventor of rock-and-roll, Chuck Berry almost never drank or took drugs. Johnny Cash, who crossed the line between country and pop, did both. These two powerful performers, one Black and one white, transformed the nature of contemporary music, and their biographies are studies in the ways biographers can shape the stories of lives.

These two sinners, in the secular and religious sense of the word, broke the law and did some of their best work in prison — Cash in his concerts for criminals, Berry in writing some of his best songs while serving a sentence after a conviction under the Mann act for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines for illicit purposes.

Early on, Berry rejected his religious upbringing, and his work is remarkable, R.J. Smith points out, for its absence of religious tropes. Berry regarded his music as his religion, so to speak, and his work as having a consecration of its own. Then there was Cash, the Man in Black, who recorded the New Testament and spoke often of his devotion to Jesus and his need for redemption. 

R.J. Smith goes into the minute particulars, as Boswell called them, of an individual’s life, so that we track how Berry created his greatest songs even as he recklessly went after white women at a time when it was dangerous to do so and was caught with an underage girl. He is shown emerging undaunted from prison, getting his high school degree, taking business courses, and unwilling to admit any need for redemption.

Greg Laurie portrays a man subject to the need for many redemptions, a man who at one point could not stop doing drugs even in front of his parents. Mr. Laurie, a pastor, applies his religious convictions to Cash — not to judge him, but to show how Cash’s life is a kind of Christian parable. 

Cash’s own beliefs provide plenty of justification for Mr. Laurie’s presentation of a man who resembled the “Apostle Paul — often ashamed and lacking the courage to stand up for Christ.” You don’t have to be a Christian to become fully absorbed in Mr. Laurie’s story. You’ve heard it before, but that is precisely what makes it so powerful.

In order to accomplish his Christian/biographical purposes, Mr. Laurie hones in on only the most telling details of Cash’s life, acknowledging earlier biographies that go into much greater detail about his career and music.  

Mr. Smith is meticulous in his attempts to explain much about Berry that he did not want to disclose — even in his autobiography. Berry is a hard case for a biographer, so that Mr. Smith in desperation resorts to the “must have been,” “must have happened” crutch that hobbles biographers. 

Mr. Laurie does well to avoid the usual problem with biographies that have a mission — to truncate the facts of a life in order to bed them in a procrustean narrative. Cash helps him out with his flagrant and flamboyant behavior followed by penance. The story of redemption is hard to resist.

Mr. Smith is not quite so successful. Middle way through his biography, the narrative sags. Berry’s tics get tiresome — demanding cash before he performs, refusing to leave his dressing room until the money is delivered, holing up in the backseat of a Cadillac with the female conquest of the moment.

Not that these tics are all there is to Berry.  He was a brilliant composer and singer, with a diction that rivaled Nat King Cole, his hero. Berry developed into a shrewd businessman, and did much to benefit the Black community he grew up in. His savvy handling of the media, and how he used his hostility to it to his own advantage, is well told.

Berry was a groundbreaker, with songs like “Maybellene,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” that were coded parables about Black men and women who were able, no matter the obstacles, to exert the very agency that drove Berry himself to become such a shrewd musician and businessman. 

In their inimitable ways, whatever their differences, both Berry and Cash “walked the line” with their “eyes wide open all the time.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Reading Biography” and “Confessions of a Serial Biographer”