Chuck Berry's Cadillac Eldorado
Cadillac · 1973
A bright red Cadillac convertible with the top down is parked on the top floor of the museum, as if it had just pulled up outside a club. It belonged to Chuck Berry, the guitarist and songwriter from St. Louis whose records in the nineteen fifties, Maybellene, Johnny B. Goode and Roll Over Beethoven, are the founding documents of rock and roll. Berry loved Cadillacs, sang about them, and drove this nineteen seventy three Eldorado for years.
The car is the centrepiece of the Musical Crossroads gallery, which traces African American music from spirituals and the blues through jazz, gospel, soul, funk and hip hop. Around it you will find Louis Armstrong's trumpet, Marian Anderson's gown and the huge silver spaceship used on stage by Parliament Funkadelic. Look at the Eldorado's chrome, the white leather interior and the sheer length of the bonnet; in the segregated America of Berry's youth, a car like this was a statement of freedom, and Maybellene is, after all, a song about a car chase.
Berry donated the Cadillac to the museum in twenty eleven, along with the cherry red Gibson guitar he called Maybellene, which is also in the collection. He died in twenty seventeen at the age of ninety, having performed almost to the end. The car is a reminder that the story told in this building is not only about struggle but also about joy, invention and the music the whole world now dances to.
Did You Know? Chuck Berry drove the car himself in the nineteen eighties film Hail Hail Rock and Roll, and he gave it to the museum together with his guitar Maybellene.
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