Fred Rothwell's
Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy (Music Mentor Books, 2001) is the ultimate book for any serious Chuck Berry record collector: All Berry sessions, all the songs, all the session musicians, where to find which song if ever released, and tons of additional stuff.
First published in 2001 the book consists mainly of a 240 page commented "sessionography", a list of 93 recording sessions Chuck participated in between 1954 and 2000. For each session Fred lists the musicians and the songs recorded, whether released or not. For every song he shows a few main records containing it. He also fully describes and critizises every recording.
Chuck Berry's recorded legacy is not complete yet, though. After publication of Fred Rothwell's book we found out about an additional recording session which took place in early 1972:
During the same tour through Europe which resulted in the BBC session of March 1972, German TV station "Radio Bremen" recorded a live version of
Johnny B. Goode for their
Beat Club TV show. This recording can be seen on the DVD
Beat Club - The Best of '72. While in the studio at Bremen, Berry was interviewed. A decade later, Radio Bremen used this interview in issue 15 of their radio series
Roll over Beethoven - Zur Geschichte der populären Musik, a series covering the history of rock from the mid 1940s to the late 1970s. And another decade later, the German record label Bear Family re-issued the complete radio series as a box set containing 52 CDs and a 300+ page book. As such the interview or at least four segments of it ended on a commercially available CD and therefore in this description of Berry recordings. The box set is called
Geschichte der Popmusik (
Bear Family BCD16300).