Brown Eyed Handsome Man - Chuck Berry

If you just think of Chuck Berry as the guitar guy who did the duck walk, you're selling this great pop poet/rapper extremely short. I've never heard a Chuck Berry song that didn't have great lyrics and great lyrics that are unlike those of any other songwriter in his time (which includes the present). His great lyric vignettes are delivered so seamlessly on the wings of such catchy little R&B melodies that many will never notice the craft delivered in each Berry number. Choosing one to write about is terribly difficult.
"Brown Eyed Handsome Man," originally released as the B-side to his great "Too Much Monkey Business," is very much a black power song. If you replace "eyed" in the title with "skinned" you have the forerunner to James Brown's "I'm Black and I'm Proud." Unlike Brown's anthem however, the Berry story is a satirical history lesson. Each verse is a different example of a brown eyed character that a woman (often a white woman) couldn't help but be in love with. From the first line of the first verse you have pure social commentary/ satire... "Arrested on charges of unemployment he was sitting in the witness stand". But what the men who would wrongly put away this unemployed dark fellow don't know, "the little girl's understand" as Willie Dixon would say. "The Judges wife told the district attorney you better free that brown eyed man. If you want you're job you better free that brown eyed man."
Chuck Berry was one of Bob Dylan's heroes and there's a very audible similarity between Berry's informally smart, wise cracking outsider commentator and those that would narrate Dylan's most famous mid sixties songs. Long before Dylan's hobos were getting "a date with Botticelli's niece", Berry's joker gives us an art history lesson...

Marlo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrastlin' match
to win a brown eyed handsome man
she fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man

The chord changes that guide the song are simple I's and IV's and V's. But they're put together unlike any other Chess Rhythm & Blues number of the 50's. The song's feel borrows as much from C&W as it does from R&B. This was something very particular to Chuck Berry and his work on a predominantly blues oriented label in the 50's. This song would be great art if were written today. In 1956 it was the work of a cutting edge commentator. How many songwriters managed to have fun, make people dance and innovate both pop music and guitar playing while telling a story at once so comic and so biting that few will even pick up on it 50+ years later?