“If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry,” John Lennon observed in 1972. From country to jazz and blues, Chuck Berry’s music stood like a signpost at the crossroads of America’s major guitar styles, pointing the way ahead
Some musicians can be neatly summarised by posterity when they die. Chuck Berry was never going to be one of them. He made the attempt himself, in an autobiography, and in some ways you have to go far to beat his own description of who he was as a guitarist, in the context of the great players who had gone before him.
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