On this day · 49 years ago · 1977
49 Years Ago Today: Carl Hogan, the Guitarist Who Wrote Rock's Most Famous Riff Before Rock Existed, Died
Twelve years before Chuck Berry recorded Johnny B. Goode, a jump-blues guitarist named Carl Hogan already played its intro riff, on a completely different song, for a completely different bandleader.
By Lucille, Blues desk · Edited by Cadence ·
Carl Hogan, an electric guitarist in Louis Jordan's Tympany Five, died July 8, 1977, in St. Louis, at 59. His guitar riff on Jordan's 1946 hit Ain't That Just Like a Woman became, almost note-for-note, the intro to Chuck Berry's 1958 Johnny B. Goode, one of rock and roll's most famous guitar lines. Berry publicly credited Hogan for it, though Hogan died decades before the connection reached most fans.
The riff before the riff
In 1946, bandleader Louis Jordan added an electric guitarist to his popular jump-blues outfit, the Tympany Five: Carl Hogan, a St. Louis-raised player born October 15, 1917. Per Wikipedia's account of his career, Hogan played the opening guitar riff on Jordan's single Ain't That Just Like a Woman (They'll Do It Every Time), recorded that same year. The song did real business, reaching No. 1 on the R&B jukebox chart and No. 17 on the pop chart, but for most listeners today, the song itself isn't the famous part. The guitar lick that opens it is.
Chuck Berry borrows it, note for note, in 1958
Twelve years later, a guitarist from Hogan's own hometown of St. Louis recorded a song that would become one of the most-covered guitar intros in rock history. Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode opens with a riff that, per Wikipedia's account of the song's history, is almost identical to what Hogan played on Ain't That Just Like a Woman. Berry never hid it. He named Hogan directly: "The first time I heard [the riff] was in one of Carl Hogan's riffs in Louis Jordan's band." Elsewhere, Berry widened the credit: "put a little Carl Hogan, a little T-Bone Walker, and a little Charlie Christian together, and look what a span of people that you will please." Chuck Berry's own guitar rig, a Gibson archtop strung with light-gauge nickel-wound strings in standard tuning, became the template for rock and roll lead guitar. Its most famous four bars trace straight back to a jump-blues sideman most fans never learned the name of.
St. Louis to St. Louis, and a quiet death
Hogan kept recording with Jordan's Tympany Five until 1949, then largely faded from the spotlight relative to the bandleaders and stars he'd backed. He died July 8, 1977, in St. Louis, the same city that raised Berry, at age 59. There's no indication he ever framed his own career around the Johnny B. Goode connection. It's a piece of guitar history that traveled almost entirely through Berry's own repeated, generous acknowledgment in interviews, rather than through anything Hogan sought credit for himself.
Hogan isn't the only session player whose fingerprints ended up on a song bigger than anyone expected. Danny Cedrone's reused guitar solo on Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock is the same story from a different decade: a hired guitarist plays a handful of notes for scale wages, and those notes outlive everyone in the room.
The gear behind a riff that outlived its writer
Neither Hogan's specific guitar nor amp from the 1946 session is well documented today. What is documented is the sound the riff demands: a light-gauge nickel-wound electric set, the same territory Chuck Berry's own Gibson archtops used across his catalog, and the standard starting point for anyone chasing that clean, biting, rhythm-into-lead rock and roll tone. A nickel-wound Slinky set or the D'Addario equivalent below both live in that same historical lane.
EXL110 XL Nickel Wound (.010–.046)
Why this one: A workhorse nickel-wound set in the same .010-.046 territory as Chuck Berry's documented rig, the family of tone this riff has been played on for eight decades, from Hogan's original to every rock and roll rhythm player since.
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