Feature: The New York Times Hunts For The 'Promised Land' With Chuck Berry

The New York Times follows the route of the African American experience plotted by Berry's lyrics over the years.  See the whole feature here

Steve Knopper writes: "Chuck Berry’s 1964 classic “Promised Land” is all about motion. The opening guitar riff is a big and fast thing taking off, a bus leaving the station, a jet rising from the tarmac. The poor boy, our narrator, is endlessly rollin’ and ridin’, straddling that Greyhound, smoking into New Orleans, swinging low chariot, coming down easy.

It is a motion specific to the African-American experience in the 20th century: “The one thing they could do, that they couldn’t do under slavery, was move,” said Mark Burford, an associate music professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

And it is a motion designed to pull yourself out of trouble: “Each verse seems to have something happen, or lose something,” the Texas rocker Joe Ely told me, “but always, at the end of the next verse, it rises up like a phoenix.”"