The father of rock ’n’ roll

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

Charles Berry, who has died aged 90, was born in 1926 into a middle-class family, and brought up in St Louis, Missouri. His father was a carpenter and deacon at a Baptist church; his mother was a school principal. One of six children, Berry learnt to play the piano as a boy, sang in the church choir and developed, from his parents, a love for poetry. He loved Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan, and taught himself guitar. But in his teens, he fell in with a bad crowd and took part in an armed robbery. He spent three years in a youth prison. Soon after his release in 1948, he married his girlfriend, Themetta (Toddy) Suggs, with whom he went on to have four children, and worked in a car plant and as a hairdresser while performing in bars in the evenings. By the early 1950s, he’d learnt – from T-bone Walker – the technique of bending two strings to create power and drive (the Chuck Berry lick), and had added some hillbilly twang to his blues, to appeal to the white audiences who favoured country music. He’d also perfected his signature “duck walk” – hopping across the stage in a half crouch, one leg extended, while playing his guitar.

His big break came in 1955, when he travelled to Chicago hoping to meet his hero, Muddy Waters. Waters directed Berry to his own label, Chess Records. Leonard Chess agreed to listen to a demo tape, and was struck by one song – an old country tune called Ida Mae that Berry had given an upbeat tempo, and lyrics featuring a boy “motorvatin’” over a hill, and seeing a girl “in a Coup de Ville”. Recognising its potential in the emerging teen market, Chess released it as Maybellene. It reached No. 5 in the pop charts, and made Berry a star. As Chess put it, “the big beat, the cars and young love; it was a trend and we jumped on it”. A tour followed, but on at least one occasion, Berry was turned away from the venue: the promoters had booked him not realising that he was black. In Knoxville, Texas, he sat outside while a white band played his songs.

The following year, he produced Roll Over Beethoven, heralding the arrival of a new cultural force: “My heart’s beatin’ rhythm / and my soul keeps on singin’ the blues / Roll Over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news”. Although well past his teens, he wrote vividly about the teenage experience – school, soda fountains, cars, girls – but explored other themes too, said the Los Angeles Times. Brown Eyed Handsome Man “is a playful but potent statement of racial pride”. Too Much Monkey Business, with its torrent of gripes (“Runnin’ to and fro / Hard workin’ at the mill / Never fail, in the mail / Yeah, come a rotten bill”), satirised the frustrations of working life. Johnny B. Goode, perhaps his most famous song, is partly autobiographical; it was originally “a coloured boy who played guitar just like a ringing a bell”; he changed it to “country boy” so as not to put off white audiences. There was poetry in his lyrics, but he was ever the pragmatist. “I wrote about cars because half the people had cars, or wanted them,” he told The Independent in 2002. “I wrote about love, because everyone wants that. I wrote songs white people could buy, because that’s nine pennies out of every dime. That was my goal: to look at my bank book and see a million dollars there.”

For all his success, Berry remained a target as a high-profile black man in pre-civil rights America; many felt that when he was arrested in 1959, race, and his affairs with white women, were a factor. Berry had met a 14-year-old waitress and prostitute in Mexico, and had offered her a job in his nightclub in St Louis. In 1961, an all-white jury found him guilty of transporting a minor across state borders for “immoral purposes”, in violation of the notoriously ambiguous terms of the Mann Act, a law introduced to combat white slavery. When he was released, in 1963, friends said that Berry had changed, that he’d grown hard and bitter. He had further hits in the 1960s, but when he finally scored a No. 1 in 1972, it was with a smutty novelty song called My Ding-aLing. His new records slowed to a trickle, but he went on touring – often insisting on being paid in cash, upfront. In 1979, he served four months in jail for tax evasion; in 1990 – four years after he’d become one of the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame – he was sued by 60 women who said he’d secretly filmed them in the loos of a restaurant he owned. He settled out of court. His famous acolytes continued to pay court, although they often received short shrift. In 1987, he caught Keith Richards touching one of his guitars backstage at a concert, and punched him in the face. On his 90th birthday last year, he announced that – after a gap of 38 years – he had recorded one final album: Chuck. He dedicated it to his wife, “my beloved Toddy. My darlin’ I’m growing old! I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!”

“I wrote about love, because everyone wants that. I wrote songs white people could buy, because that’s nine pennies out of every dime.”