Brown Eyed Handsome Man

Song facts

From Wikipedia:

“Brown Eyed Handsome Man” is a rock and roll song written and recorded by Chuck Berry, originally released by Chess Records in September 1956 as the B-side of “Too Much Monkey Business.” It was also included on Berry’s 1957 debut album, After School Session. The song title was also used as the title of a biography of Berry.

Background and recording

“Brown Eyed Handsome Man” was written after Berry visited several African-American and Hispanic areas in California. During his time there, he saw a Hispanic man being arrested by a policeman when “some woman came up shouting for the policeman to let him go.”

“Brown Eyed Handsome Man” was recorded on April 16, 1956, in Chicago, Illinois. The session was produced by the Chess brothers, Leonard and Phil. Backing Berry were Johnnie Johnson on piano, L. C. Davis on tenor saxophone, Willie Dixon on bass, and Fred Below on drums.

The song was released in September 1956 and reached number 5 on Billboard magazine’s R&B Singles chart later that year.

Relevance in race relations

Glenn C. Altschuler argued that the lyrics of the song “played slyly with racial attitudes and even fears.” Martha Bayles noted that “Berry’s penchant for bragging about his ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’’s appeal for white females outraged a lot of people.”

Cover versions

The song has been covered by many artists, including Buddy Holly, whose recording was a posthumous top-five hit in the United Kingdom in 1963 and was released on the album Reminiscing. Johnny Rivers also covered the song on his first album, At the Whisky à Go Go, in 1964, as did Nina Simone on her 1967 album High Priestess of Soul and Waylon Jennings on a single from his 1970 album Waylon. It was also covered by Robert Cray on the 1987 live tribute album to Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll and by Paul McCartney on his 1999 album Run Devil Run and on a double A-side single with “No Other Baby“. […]

From the liner notes of “Run Devil Run“:

This Chuck Berry original is more familiar from Holly’s posthumous 1963 single. “We wanted to put an accordion on our version, make it slightly cajun, just to get it away from Buddy’s a bit“.

From an interview with Laura Gross (promotional interview for “Run Devil Run” in 1999):

Paul McCartney: Yeah, this is just a real nice song that Chuck Berry wrote. And we used to know Buddy’s version of it. I think John used to do it a bit, when we were looking for songs. It was one of John’s. I always liked it, it’s a mouthful. Woh-he-got-ta-da-da-da-da-T-W-A-saw-a-man, very Chuck, you know. American life. Flying across the desert in a TWA, I saw a woman walking ‘cross the sand. She’d been walking fifty miles en route to Bombay. Where’s that, where’s that come from, you know. But I just love it. It just pulls it up. To meet the brown eyed handsome man. It’s good, good lyrics in there. As I told you, Milo de Venus was a beautiful girl, she had the world in the palm of her hands. She lost both her arms in a wrestling match to find the brown eyed handsome man, you know. There’s a great humour in that. And it scans great and it sings great. That’s the stuff about that, that’s the secret about this stuff. You can write the cleverest lyrics that don’t sing good. But I liked a lot of Chuck’s things. And so like Back In The U.S.A. was the catalyst for me writing Back In The U.S.S.R. Was like a spoof on Chuck’s stuff. So I, I, I respect him a lot as a songwriter.

Last updated on September 19, 2016

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