Chuck Berry dead at 90
Chuck Berry, the perpetual wild man of rock music who helped define its rebellious spirit in the 1950s and was the sly poet laureate of songs about girls, cars, school and even the “any old way you choose it” vitality of the music itself, died on March 18 at his home in St. Charles County, Missouri. He was 90. St. Charles County police announced the death in a Facebook post on its website, saying officers responded to a medical emergency at Berry’s home, administered lifesaving techniques but could not revive him. No further information was available.
“While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together,” reads Berry’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
A seminal figure in early rock music, he was all the rarer still for writing, singing and playing his own music. His songs and the boisterous performances directly influenced the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and later Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger.
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named him No. 6 on its list of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Berry so embodied 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.
Besides Berry, members of the rock hall of fame’s inaugural class included Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino and the Everly Brothers. Of those he survived, Berry remained the most indefatigable and acclaimed performer, playing concerts all over the world well into his 80s.
Despite John Lennon’s oft-quoted quip – “If you tried to give rock- and-roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’” – Berry was an unlikely idol for a burgeoning teen subculture that he sang about at the dawn of the rock era.
He was 30, married and the father of two when he made his first recording, Maybellene in 1955. The song – a story of a man in a Ford V8 chasing his unfaithful girlfriend in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville – charted No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 5 on the pop music charts.
It was soon followed by Rock and Roll Music (“it’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it”) and Sweet Little Sixteen, whose astute reference to the teen-oriented TV show American Bandstand (“Well, they’ll be rockin’ on Bandstand, Philadelphia, P.A.”) helped him connect to adolescent record-buyers. With his lithe, athletic body, high cheekbones and perfectly pomaded hair, Berry personified the dangerous appeal of rock.
He’d grin salaciously and telegraph the lyrics with a wide-eyed, almost childlike exuberance and then shoot across the stage, unleashing a staccato burst of bright, blaring guitar notes.
When he went into his signature “duck walk,” his legs seemed to be made of rubber, and his whole body moved with clocklike precision – the visual statement of his music’s kinetic energy. His charisma was the gold standard for all the rock-and-roll extroverts who followed.
He once told The Washington Post that he initiated the duck walk at the Brooklyn Paramount theater in 1956, based on a pose he sometimes struck as a child.
“I had nothing else to do during the instrumental part of the song,” he said. “I did it, and here comes the applause. Well, I knew to coin anything that was that entertaining, so I kept it up.”
Song writer, singer, guitarist, performer
Berry was credited with penning more than 100 songs, the best known of which used carefully crafted rhymes and offered tightly written vignettes about American life. They became an influential part of the national soundtrack for generations of listeners and practitioners.
Back in the U.S.A. (1959), later covered by Linda Ronstadt, delighted in an America where “hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.” And School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell) (1957), written about the overcrowded St. Louis schools of Berry’s youth, became an anthem for bored, restless kids everywhere.
The Beach Boys had a hit record with Surfin’ USA (1963), its melody borrowed without credit from Sweet Little Sixteen. The Beatles began their first U.S. concert, at the Washington Coliseum, with Roll Over Beethoven (1956), whose narrator, in the throes of “the rockin’ pneumonia,” issues the fevered command: “Roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
And when Bob Dylan turned toward electric rock-and-roll, he acknowledged that his Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965) borrowed its meter almost directly from Berry’s Too Much Monkey Business’ (1956).
Perhaps the most performed of his songs – indeed, one of the most performed of all rock songs – was Johnny B. Goode (1957). Its storyline embodied Berry’s experience as an African-American born into segregation who lived to see “his name in lights:”
“The gateway from freedom, I was told, was somewhere near New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold” into slavery, Berry wrote in his selftitled 1987 memoir. “I’d been told my grandfather lived ‘back up in the woods among the evergreens’ in a log cabin. I revived the era with a story about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode.”
Berry said he knew the song could have a wider appeal.
“I thought it would seem biased to my white fans to say ‘coloured boy’ so I changed it to ‘country boy,’” he added.
In an interview with The Washington Post this year, rock historian Albin Zak called Berry a “very literate” wordsmith but that more important was the “durability” of his songs.
“In early rock-and-roll, there were so many one-hit wonders, but Chuck had so many hits that he was one of the most recognizable stars in the business,” Zak said. “When rock became solidified in 1964 and the British invasion comes along with bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones performing Chuck Berry songs, it seals the deal on the vitality of that repertoire. His music became tradition at that point.”
Although his music was rooted in the blues, Berry developed a clearer, more accessible singing style geared to a broader audience. He had been deeply influenced by Nat King Cole, the jazz pianist and crooner known for his impeccable diction.
By the late 1950s, Berry was one of the new music’s most prominent stars. He toured with disc jockey Alan Freed’s 1957 rock-and-roll revue and appeared in teen-centric movies including Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956) and Go, Johnny, Go! (1959).
Despite 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 Berry was relegated to the oldies circuit by the end of the decade.
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 AfricanAmerican neighborhood.
Although his parents and three of his sisters sang in a Baptist choir, Berry’s own youthful tastes gravitated to more secular pop music. He was 14 when he began playing guitar and performing at parties, but that was interrupted by a three-year stint in reform school for his role in a bungled armed robbery.
After his release, he worked for his father and on an automobile assembly line while studying for a career in hairdressing. On weekends, he sang at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, with a group led by pianist Johnnie Johnson, who later played on many of Berry’s records.
At the urging of Muddy Waters, Berry took his demo tapes to Chess Records. Label owner Leonard Chess was impressed by Ida May, a country-and-western-styled tune, and said he would allow Berry to record it if he would change the name to Maybellene.
Berry received the top honours of his profession, including a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1984 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.
In later years, when Berry reflected on his age, he always made it clear that he intended to keep rocking as long as he lived.
“Elvis’s songs will always be there, and I hope mine will be after I’m gone,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. “But you can’t compare that, because he’s gone and I’m not!”