"Promised Land" is a song written and first recorded by Chuck Berry in 1964 for his album St. Louis to Liverpool. Released in 1965, it was Berry's first single issued following his prison term for a Mann Act conviction.
In the lyrics, the singer (who refers to himself as "the poor boy") tells of his journey from Norfolk, Virginia to the "Promised Land", California, mentioning various cities along the way.
Berry wrote the song while still in priso...
more
"Promised Land" is a song written and first recorded by Chuck Berry in 1964 for his album St. Louis to Liverpool. Released in 1965, it was Berry's first single issued following his prison term for a Mann Act conviction.
In the lyrics, the singer (who refers to himself as "the poor boy") tells of his journey from Norfolk, Virginia to the "Promised Land", California, mentioning various cities along the way.
Berry wrote the song while still in prison and borrowed an atlas from the prison library to plot the itinerary. The poor boy boarded a Greyhound bus that stopped in Charlotte, NC but "bypassed Rock Hill", which may have been a sly reference to the South Carolina town where Civil Rights leader John Lewis and others were brutally beaten when their Freedom Rider bus stopped there in 1961. The bus rolls on through Atlanta but breaks down in Birmingham. The poor boy boards a train "across Mississippi clean" to New Orleans. He makes it to Houston, where friends stake him to a silk suit,...
less
