But now that the man has died — on March 18, unexpectedly, at 90 — let’s get real. Chuck Berry did in fact invent rock’n’roll. Of course similar musics would have sprung up without him. Elvis was Elvis before he’d ever heard of Chuck Berry. Charles’ proto-soul vocals and Brown’s everything-is-a-drum were innovations as profound as Berry’s. Bo Diddley was a more accomplished guitarist. Doo-wop and New Orleans were moving right along. Et cetera. But none of those musics would have been as rich or seminal without him.
After all, it was Chuck Berry who had the cultural ambition to sing as if the color of his skin wasn’t a thing — mixing crystalline enunciation with a bad-boy timbre devoid of melisma and burr, he took aim at both the country fans he coveted and the white teenagers he saw coming. Nor did teen-targeted hits like “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “School Day” merely play to the kids Elvis had transformed into the biz’s next big market. With his instinct for the historical moment, alertness to the fads and folkways of his young fans, delight in an unprecedented American prosperity, matchless verbal facility and autobiographical recall, Berry played a major role in inventing teendom itself — in augmenting its self-awareness and turning it into a subculture. And crucially, he established rock’n’roll as a songwriter’s medium. Some in his cohort wrote a fair amount, others barely at all. But it was Berry in particular who presaged Buddy Holly, the 1950s’ second great-songwriter-cum-great-performer. Between them they established the artistic template of ’60s rock, where self-written material was a prerequisite. And with the ’60s in the mix, consider Chuck Berry’s guitar.
Caveats again. Elvis fetishized an instrument that Scotty Moore could actually play, Carl Perkins was a master, and Bo Diddley — never a major hitmaker but always a legend — was a protean virtuoso. Each one imprinted himself on history, Bo especially. But Chuck Berry was the wellspring as a player and a showman. The two-stringed “Chuck Berry lick” was really many closely related licks. As critic Gregory Sandow once pointed out, different songs’ “fanfares” were distinct: “Maybellene”’s car horn, “School Day”’s school bell, “Too Much Monkey Business”’s jangling telephone, “Roll Over Beethoven”’s mini-solo. And though you can discern versions of that lick in recordings by both T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan sideman Carl Hogan, it was Berry who had the gall and imagination to amp up such stray note clusters and forge a whole music out of them, integrating Ike Turner-style, guitar-based R&B and neater country-style picking into a new electric sound that changed the world’s ears. For the very different styles of George Harrison and Keith Richards — of, you know, the Beatles and the Stones — Berry’s guitar was foundational, and soon there wasn’t a rock guitarist anywhere who couldn’t play his shit. Contrary as always, Bob Dylan was more taken with his groove — the rhythm of “Too Much Monkey Business,” he’s said, was where he got “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Chuck Berry: inventor of rock’n’roll, lodestone of the “rock” rock’n’roll generated.
Berry and wife Themetta at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.
Yet though Charles Edward Anderson Berry got fairly rich remaking the world, which he always claimed was the main idea, he never became any kind of tycoon even though he was a famous skinflint who demanded cash payment before he’d join his pickup band onstage. And though he was key in establishing unalloyed democratic fun as rock’n’roll’s core value, he was too cantankerous a guy to leave his admirers feeling that he enjoyed his genius much. Born Oct. 18, 1926, which made this mythologist of teens the oldest of the rock’n’roll originals, he was raised in a lower-middle-class black St. Louis neighborhood by solid, hardworking, musical parents; one sister trained to be an opera singer. Chuck was also musical and hardworking — he won a guitar competition in high school, married for life in 1948 and was supporting a family of four as of 1952. But his bad-boy voice wasn’t merely an act. An absurd crime spree involving a fake gun earned him the first of three prison bids in 1944, long before he and pianist Johnnie Johnson hit Chess Records in 1955.