Dualtone Music Group, Inc.

It's no secret that although Elvis Presley answered to the title, the real king of rock & roll was always one Charles Edward Anderson Berry. For many years before his death in 2017 at the age of 90, Chuck Berry played a once-a-month gig at the Blueberry Hill nightclub in the Delmar Loop neighborhood of his hometown, St. Louis, MO. A living memorial of sorts for fans like Lorde and Lemmy who made the pilgrimage, Berry performed loose, informal greatest hits sets where he duck walked, growled telling asides and was again, just for an evening, an adored star. The set list of this collection of performances from 2005-2006 is obvious: "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Rock and Roll Music," "Nadine," and "Johnny B. Goode." No one could ever sing Chuck Berry songs with quite the inflections and enthusiasm as their author, and while here he's talking most lyrics rather than actually singing, he convincingly fakes his way through it all. Berry was fortunate enough in his youth to join the band of the great pianist/songwriter/arranger Johnnie Johnson (whom he never properly credited for songs written together), and later in his career became infamous for traveling alone and using a different local band every night even on long tours. During the Blueberry Hill years, he used a fairly steady group that included his son Charles Berry, Jr. on guitar, his daughter Ingrid Berry on harmonica as well as longtime cohorts pianist Robert Lohr, bassist/bandleader Jimmy Marsala and drummer Keith Robinson. While they were never the equal of his earlier bands—mostly due to the son not being anywhere near as talented as the father on guitar—they were adequate. But by then it was more about a good-time family act than any musical envelope pushing anyway. The recording quality varies, sadly being at its worst on his biggest hit (and album closer), "Johnny B. Goode." Still, for fans of the man and his incredible legacy which did include a wealth of previous live records, this is Berry, in his '70s, comfortable and confident in a venue he loved. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

There's a telling moment on Hayes Carll's seventh album that perfectly, hilariously and unintentionally illustrates his country-outsider status. Weeks before the album's debut, the Zac Brown Band—about as aw-shucks insider as you can get— released a bouncy, can't-we-all-just-get-along ditty called "Same Boat" ("We're all in the same boat/ Fishing in the same hole") Carll, meanwhile, has a bluesy, J.J. Cale-esque song called "Different Boats": "You row your boat and I'll row mine/ We'll both get there in our own sweet time." As if the lyrical and stylistic differences aren't stark enough, there's even a cantankerous guitar solo to set Carll's apart. Carll's country has its roots not in the shiny skyline of Nashville, but in the weird and wild expanses of Texas. You can hear the spiritual inspiration of the state's three-named outlaw greats: Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jerry Jeff Walker (born in New York but adapted to be as Texan as they come), Billy Joe Shaver. It's in the honky-tonk stomp and drunken fiddle of "She'll Come Back to Me" and the pumping boogie-woogie piano and spirited guitar of "To Keep From Being Found," which finds Carll's narrator disappearing to a motel "where you pay by the week" after being chased out ot Texas by a woman. It's a similar story on "The Way I Love You," Lyle Lovett-esque with its dirty blues guitar and moody organ: "I drove all the way to Tennessee just to keep from looking at you ... [but] goddamn, the way I love you." Carll's road-worn voice is a comfortable fit for his I'm-no-angel stories, like on jangling "You Get It All," his cracked idea of a love song: "All my tame and all my wild, all my man and all my child … all my blessing, all my curse, from the chapel to the hearse, you get it all." He duets with co-writer Brandy Clark on the clever steel guitar ballad "In the Mean Team" ("Most times the good times are the times that we're in ... but the love that we had turns bitter and bad in the mean time"), her smooth, soaring voice softening his sandpaper drawl. Carll's wife, the great Allison Moorer, lends her brilliantly heart-tugging style for a co-write on the hymn-like "If It Was Up to Me." TJ and John Osborne of Brothers Osborne co-wrote "Nice Things," a deliciously cracked and rusty earworm about God taking a fishing trip to Georgia, only to reel in an oil barrel, and getting busted by the fuzz for smoking weed—but, in true outsider style, it casts God as a woman. (That's pretty much like giving a middle-finger salute in Nashville.) Moorer also contributed to the excellent "Leave It All Behind," which mashes up a Levon Helm shuffle, organ, both Southern rock guitar and sunny-through-the-rain George Harrison wooziness, and singalong layered vocals for a thrill. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz