He bridged the racial divide and was a sensation post-WWII Rock ’n’ roll icon Chuck Berry dies

Chuck Berry was rock’s greatest practitioner, guitarist, and the greatest pure rock ’n’ roll writer who ever lived. This is a tremendous loss of a giant for the ages. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

New York, March 19: Chuck Berry, one of the creators of rock ’n’ roll who helped shape modern youth culture with his dance-ready rhythms but who struggled to overcome institutional racism, died on Saturday. He was 90.

Police in the St. Louis area, where Berry was born and lived most of his life, said that first responders found the guitar legend unresponsive when they answered an emergency call at his home.

Berry became a sensation in the years after World War II as the baby boom generation came of age in an increasingly prosperous America. The middle-class son of a carpenter and a high school principal, Berry grew up stage showmanship, although he hesitated to say that he created rock ’n’ roll.

“It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues,” he later said. “It’s called rock now.” Whatever the music was named, Bruce Springsteen, one of many artists heavily influenced by Berry, said the man was indispensable. His 1958 hit Johnny B.

was so influential and recognisable that the US space programme chose it to represent rock music for potential extraterrestrial listeners on the Voyager spacecraft.

Berry was one of the first African Americans to find a widespread white audience, with his gentle demeanor and the usually innocuous subject matter of his songs initially insulating him in a country where many black people lived under Jim Crow institutionalized racism.

But that changed as his fame grew. After a packed performance in 1959 in Meridian Mississippi, a white crowd set upon Berry and forced him to leave through a side entrance after accusing him of kissing a white girl among his fans.

His career soon was interrupted when he was arrested in 1959 under an obscure law for taking a 14-year-old girl across state lines for “immoral purposes.” He was convicted by an all-white jury and served a year and a half in prison. — AFP —