Still on a rock ‘n’ roll kick, celebrating my new Rock ‘n’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction, this is another favorite from the brilliant Mr. Berry, my nominee for the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songwriter of all time. I’ve said all this before, but he had an incredible gift for fitting words together in ways that sounded completely natural while scanning and rhyming so easily that a lot of people don’t realize how incredibly difficult that is. I’ve given that rap in my post about “Nadine,” and it goes for pretty much all of his classic work.

I’ve already posted a bunch of Berry’s songs: “Nadine,” of course, and “Maybellene,” “Memphis,” “No Money Down,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Promised Land…” I know a few others, and will eventually get around to those as well. Like I say, I think he was the greatest, and one mark of great songwriting is that his compositions stick in my head — there are songs of his that I never learned, never sang, but if I think about them, I realize that I remember every word.

I think this is one of those. I’m not sure; maybe I sat down and learned it at some point, but I rarely sang it, even for my own amusement — and amusement is definitely the point.

It’s in the general category of Berry’s car songs, following “Maybelline” and “No Money Down,” but written in the 1960s, while he was in prison on a Mann Act conviction. Though he tends to be associated with the previous decade, Berry was at the top of his game in that period and the best of those songs — “Nadine,” “Promised Land,” “You Never Can Tell,” “It Wasn’t Me,” and this one — have an imaginative flair and verbal intricacy that went beyond his earlier hits.

In his autobiography — a display of Berry’s inimitably quirky prose, which he wrote during another prison term — he describes himself at that point as “thirty-five years old, really set back, out of contact, feeling more black but still intact, and determined to make the best of it.” He kept busy taking college classes, wrote a bunch of new songs, and despite the ugliness of his situation, the writing had a brilliant lightness and humor.

He got out in 1963 and was shortly releasing new records, first “Nadine,” which announced his return and did pretty well, then this one, which cracked the Top 10. It’s a funny, self-deprecating story with a classic Berry beat, and I’m thinking I should perform it more often.