I have completed the links to the amazon MP3 offers.
This means you can now listen to excerpts of
- all Chuck Berry recordings from Chess records between 1955 and 1966
- more than half of the Mercury recordings
- some of the later Chess tracks
- the 60th birthday concert
- the Atco recordings
- and various live recordings from Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Coventry, Wembley and Peterborough
99% of the 334 MP3 clips are offered by amazon U.S.A., a few are only available from amazon UK or amazon Germany. In those cases I added links to the corresponding files on these sites.
I think I have found all the Chuck Berry tracks offered by amazon. This turned out to be much more complicated than what you would expect. Here are some of the problems I ran into checking out the almost 1.000 MP3 clips listed by amazon's search function:
- amazon (or the suppliers) digitize albums, not songs. Therefore one and the same recording such as the Chess version of Maybellene is listed 12 times from various albums. And don't be confused that running times may vary several seconds.
- Especially the live versions such as from Toronto vary in length a lot, but we know this from the CDs already.
- Sometimes the same recording is listed under various titles.
- There's a huge mix of incorrect spellings both with song titles and artist names.
- Almost none of the live version contains any kind of information about recording date or place.
Due to this there may be errors. If you find one, let me know! Within a week there have been more than 1.000 accesses to the MP3 pages. Even though most of this were by search engines, it looks as if you find this addition to my site helpful. Tell me if I can make something even better. And no - there is no way to play the complete songs without paying for it.