Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry’s career is the proof, in one person, that rock ‘n’ roll is the blues’ child. A St. Louis blues guitarist steeped in T-Bone Walker, he drove to Chicago in 1955, asked Muddy Waters how to get a record deal, and was pointed to Chess Records — the house of the electric blues. His first single, “Maybellene,” was a hopped-up rework of the country fiddle tune “Ida Red”: blues attack, hillbilly source, teenage subject matter. It went to the top of the R&B chart and deep into the pop chart, and the formula was found (Britannica, “Rock and roll”).

What Berry added was authorship. “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode” — he wrote his own songs, about cars, school, radios and the dream of stardom, in language precise enough to be poetry and universal enough to sell to every teenager in America. The double-stop guitar intro of “Johnny B. Goode” is arguably the single most imitated passage in popular music.

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones learned songwriting and guitar from his records in roughly equal measure — “If you tried to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.” Through him, the Chess blues became the lingua franca of global youth culture.