Rock ‘n' Roll Superstar Who Caught the Teen Spirit

Chuck Berry didn’t invent rock ’n’ roll – no one person could claim credit for that.

Chuck Berry 1926-2017

As Phil Everly once put it, there were “four or five avenues rolling toward one another” in the 1950s. But with his “indelible guitar licks, brash self confidence and memorable songs”, he was certainly one of its defining figures, said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. While Elvis Presley was rock’s first heartthrob, Berry was its conceptual genius: the songwriter who picked up on the spirit of teen rebellion in postwar America before the teenagers had felt it themselves, who understood that the lyrics could matter as much as the music did. Leonard Cohen once noted that “all of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry”; Bob Dylan called him “the Shakespeare of rock ’n’ roll”; and John Lennon said that “if you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry”. As for Keith Richards, he admitted, quite simply, that he’d “stolen every lick” Berry played.

Berry’s influence is hard to overstate, said Jon Caramanica, in The same paper. The Rolling Stones’ first recorded song was a cover of his Come On; The Beatles played a “streamlined, sweetened” version of Roll Over Beethoven at their first US concert. The Beach Boys reworked his Sweet Little Sixteen into Surfin’ USA (Berry sued them and won a writing credit). Dylan’s rapid-fire Subterranean Homesick Blues drew heavily on Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business. These artists brought Berry’s sound to a new audience in the 1960s; but while they increased his fame, they also helped push him into the shadows, by creating a version of rock ’n’ roll “that no longer required him, or his blackness. So, if for the remainder of his very long career he was a bit flinty, could you blame him?”