CHUCK BERRY
1926-2017
Rock ’n’ roll pioneer influenced generations with his guitar playing and showmanship.
Keith Richards had a difficult relationship with Chuck Berry.
Over the years, the American rock ’n’ roll icon, who served as both his mentor and nemesis, punched Richards in the face, kicked him off stage and once attempted to light him on fire.
But when Mr. Berry, who died Saturday at his home in St. Charles County, Mo., at age 90, won Sweden’s Polar music prize in 2014 — the musical equivalent of the Nobel prize — the irascible Rolling Stones guitarist didn’t hold back his devotion.
“Chuck Berry, he just leapt out of the radio at me,” Richards said. “I ate him, basically. I mean, I breathed him. It wasn’t just food. He was the air I breathed for many years when I was learning guitar and trying to figure out how you could be such an all-rounder. Such a great voice, such a great player and also such a great showman. It was all in one package.”
Mr. Berry was one of the key architects of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s — a seminal figure whose wild songs about cars, girls and school days had a direct influence on the Beatles, Stones and Beach Boys, plus just about everyone else who followed.
Mr. Berry was a rare triple threat in the genre’s formative years, writing, singing and performing his own music; delivering it with his signature duckwalk for good measure.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, its inaugural year. He not only outlived contemporaries Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, but he continued to play concerts all over the world well into his 80s.
Even though his songs so perfectly captured the spirit and attitude of adolescence, Mr. Berry was already 30, married and the father of two when he made his first recording, “Maybellene,” in 1955.
It didn’t matter. Hits such as “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven” all feel timeless, handed down through the years via movies, oldies radio stations, jukeboxes and retro diners.
His distinctive sound — a full-throttle collision of country, blues and R&B — arrived seemingly fully formed, offering a lucid vignette of the intricacies of American life.
“It amazes me when I hear people say, ‘I want to go out and find out who I am,’ ” Mr. Berry told Esquire in 2007. “I always knew who I was. I was going to be famous if it killed me.”
The Beach Boys had a hit in 1963 with “Surfin’ USA,” lifting its melody wholesale from “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The Beatles began their first U.S. concert, at the Washington Coliseum, in 1956 with “Roll Over Beethoven.”
When Bob Dylan went electric, he acknowledged that 1965’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was inspired directly by Mr. Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”
Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born on Oct. 18, 1926, in St. Louis. His father was a carpenter and handyman. The family — which included six children — lived in the Ville, a middle-class African American neighborhood.
Mr. Berry was 14 when he began playing guitar and performing at parties.
Although his parents and three of his sisters sang in a Baptist church choir, his own tastes gravitated to more secular pop music, including the work of blues singer Muddy Waters, the jump blues saxophonist and singer Louis Jordan, and big bands of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington.
There were scraps with the law, mostly involving car thefts and robbery, but by 21 he was out of reform school and in 1948 married his girlfriend, Themetta Suggs.
He briefly worked at a Chevrolet plant and followed his sisters to cosmetology school, picking up side gigs playing with the local group, Sir John’s Trio, which he took over after seeing a live performance by Waters.
Mr. Berry didn’t read music but picked up various techniques by watching other musicians — tricks that he would adapt to his own sound (and that would be emulated by scores of his followers). In his hit “Johnny B. Goode,” he sings about a boy who “could play the guitar just like a ringin’ a bell.”
By the late 1950s, Mr. Berry was one of new music’s most prominent stars. He toured with disc jockey Alan Freed’s 1957 rock ’n’ roll revue and appeared in teencentric movies including 1956’s “Rock, Rock, Rock!” and 1959’s “Go, Johnny, Go!”
Despite Mr. Berry’s charisma, race played a factor in preventing him from achieving Elvis-like levels of commercial success in Hollywood and Las Vegas. He had hits including “No Particular Place to Go” (1964) and “Dear Dad” (1965) and appeared in “The T.A.M.I. Show,” a 1965 concert film with James Brown, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Marvin Gaye.
But Mr. Berry was relegated to the oldies circuit by the end of the decade.
Starting in the late 1950s, Mr. Berry parlayed his earnings into Club Bandstand, a racially integrated nightclub in St. Louis, and purchased real estate for an amusement park, Berry Park, in Wentzville, Mo.
His music career, however, was nearly derailed in 1959, when he was arrested on a federal charge of taking a 14year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes. He said he didn’t know the girl’s age and had hired her to work as a hat-check girl in his nightclub.
Mr. Berry was convicted but granted an appeal on the basis of racist remarks made by the judge. A second trial also ended in a conviction. He eventually served 18 months of a three-year sentence and paid a $10,000 fine.
He was released in 1963, finding himself in the midst of the British Invasion. He rebounded quickly in the music scene but at times continued to be drawn into the headlines by legal troubles.
Mr. Berry’s 1972 recording, “My Ding-aLing,” a smutty singalong written by New Orleans bandleader Dave Bartholomew, would be his last entry in the charts and his only hit not to come from his own pen.
Alongside Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard and an elite group of others, Mr. Berry laid the groundwork for a new, revolutionary cultural movement. His work is so closely identified with the American rock tradition that his recording of “Johnny B. Goode” was included on a disc launched into space on the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1977.
“If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry,” John Lennon once famously said.
Funeral arrangements are pending.