Following the piano sound to Chicago
Harvey Charles Goering, known professionally as Barrelhouse Chuck, was born in 1958 and spent part of his youth in Gainesville, Florida. He began with drums, but hearing Otis Spann on a Muddy Waters recording redirected his attention to piano. Leroy Carr also became a central influence. The song “Barrelhouse Woman” was especially important: harmonica player Little Joe Berson heard him singing and playing it and began calling him Barrelhouse Chuck. The name remained attached to a musician whose later work ranged well beyond the exuberant playing the word barrelhouse might suggest.
In 1979 he drove from Florida to Chicago specifically to meet Sunnyland Slim. He found him at B.L.U.E.S., introduced himself, and gained entry into a circle of older players. The first attempt to establish himself in the city was financially difficult, and he left after running out of money. Work in Seattle and Alaska followed before he returned to Chicago in 1982. His commitment to the city came from particular people and sounds: he wanted to learn from musicians who had shaped the piano language he loved.
An education in homes and neighborhood clubs
Little Brother Montgomery became a close friend and teacher. Chuck spent long days at his home, learned how he approached different keys and songs, and eventually helped care for him. Sunnyland Slim introduced him to a wider community, and players including Blind John Davis, Pinetop Perkins, Detroit Junior, and Erwin Helfer offered further examples. This was not a single uniform school. Montgomery’s older repertoire, Slim’s powerful attack, Perkins’ rhythmic drive, and Detroit Junior’s songwriting and stagecraft gave Chuck different models for what a pianist could do.
He learned by watching hands on the keyboard and retaining small details that he could later develop. The aim, as he described it, was to make the borrowed knowledge his own. He worked with Big Smokey Smothers and became part of the gatherings around Sunnyland’s Sunday-night performances. He also preserved hours of informal tapes of Montgomery and valued the stories that accompanied the music. His close relationships with older musicians gave the later recordings their specificity: an arrangement or a sung phrase often recalled someone he had actually known rather than an abstract historical style.
Early records and The Sirens
Chuck’s recording career developed alongside club employment and other work, including printing. Sessions were sometimes made when he could afford studio time, resulting in releases assembled from different occasions. The Sirens Records, founded by Steven B. Dolins to record blues, gospel, and jazz keyboard musicians, offered a more sustained setting. Chuck took part in 8 Hands on 88 Keys with Erwin Helfer, Detroit Junior, and Pinetop Perkins, and followed with Prescription for the Blues. These projects placed him among the pianists whose work had shaped his own.
Chuck also played piano on Louis Myers’ final album, Tell My Story Movin’, with guitarists Steve Freund and John Primer, bassist Bob Stroger, and drummer Sam Burton. The Earwig session gave him an accompanying role beside one of the Aces’ founders, bringing his generation’s playing into direct conversation with an older Chicago musician. Myers’ own pieces and songs by earlier blues writers share the program. Chuck’s contribution belongs to the same part of his career as the piano gatherings: learning and performing were still connected, with an established musician’s repertoire providing the immediate demands of the session.
Got My Eyes on You brought a consistent band sound to the foreground. Kim Wilson plays harmonica, with former Muddy Waters rhythm-section partners Willie “Big Eyes” Smith and Calvin “Fuzz” Jones among the musicians. The repertoire reaches through Floyd Jones, Sunnyland Slim, Detroit Junior, Big Moose Walker, Little Brother Montgomery, and others. Chuck’s singing and piano give the songs continuity while retaining their different characters. The album also includes organ, reminding listeners that his keyboard interests extended beyond one favored acoustic-piano texture.
Kim Wilson and a larger stage
Wilson became an important touring and recording partner. Through that association, Chuck worked on the music for Cadillac Records and took part in high-profile events including Barack Obama’s first inauguration celebrations and the 2012 Howlin’ for Hubert concert at the Apollo Theater. The opportunities brought his playing to audiences much larger than those in Chicago’s neighborhood rooms. Yet he continued to value the spontaneous working method of a blues band: Wilson could call a key without a fixed set list, leaving the musicians to recognize the direction of the performance together.
Driftin’ from Town to Town, credited to Chuck and Kim Wilson’s Blues All-Stars, captures that familiarity. The band includes Larry Taylor, Richard Innes, Billy Flynn, Jeremy Johnson, and Sax Gordon. Its repertoire combines older blues with instrumentals and rhythm and blues, including “Stockyard Blues,” “Thirty Days,” “Flat Foot Sam,” and “Time Is Tight.” The album received a Blues Music Award nomination for traditional blues album. Chuck recalled recording quickly, drawing on the players’ knowledge of one another and of the material. Flynn in particular was a recurring partner across many sessions.
Remembering the Masters and a personal legacy
Remembering the Masters, released in 2016, makes Chuck’s debt to earlier pianists explicit. The program includes “Homage to Pinetop Perkins,” “Vicksburg Blues,” and other pieces associated with the musicians he had studied and befriended. It is also an account of his own musical life, because those relationships had occupied decades of it. His playing could be forceful and rhythmic, but the repertoire also required patience, subdued accompaniment, and sensitivity to a singer’s line. The variety helps explain why he was sought as both a solo performer and a band pianist.
Chicago public television profiled him that autumn while he was living with advanced cancer. He was inducted into the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame in 2016 and died in December at fifty-eight. His loss removed a performer and an unusually close witness to an older generation of the city’s music. The recordings remain valuable for the distinctions they preserve between those players: Montgomery is not reduced to Sunnyland, and Detroit Junior’s entertainer’s wit is not confused with Otis Spann’s phrasing. Chuck’s achievement was to absorb these individual voices into a working musical personality while helping keep their songs in circulation.