March 22, 2017
Page 5
edition
CAREERS special
Chuck Berry Dead at 90
Guitar hero
originated
rock n’ roll
(AP) — Chuck Berry, rock ‘n’
roll’s founding guitar hero and
storyteller who defined the mu-
sic’s joy and rebellion in such
classics as “Johnny B. Goode,”
”Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Roll
Over Beethoven,” died Saturday
at his home west of St. Louis. He
was 90.
Berry’s core repertoire was
some three dozen songs, his influ-
ence incalculable, from the Beat-
les and the Rolling Stones to vir-
tually any group from garage band
to arena act that called itself rock
“Everything I wrote about
wasn’t about me, but about the
people listening,” he once said.
“Johnny B. Goode,” the tale
of a guitar-playing country boy
whose mother tells him he’ll
be a star, was Berry’s signature
song, the archetypal narrative for
would-be rockers and among the
most ecstatic recordings in the
music’s history.
When NASA launched the un-
manned Voyager I in 1977, an al-
bum was stored on the craft that
would explain music on Earth to
extraterrestrials. The one rock
Guitarist, singer and songwriter Chuck Berry performs in Monaco
in 2009.
song included was “Johnny B. was transmitted. As a teenager, he
Goode.”
loved to take radios apart and put
Charles Edward Anderson Ber- them back together. Using a Nick
ry was born in St. Louis on Oct. Manoloff guitar chord book, he
18, 1926. As a child he practiced a learned how to play the hits of the
bent-leg stride that enabled him to time. He was fascinated by chord
slip under tables, a prelude to the progressions and rhythms, discov-
duck walk of his adult years. His ering that many songs borrowed
mother, like Johnny B. Goode’s, heavily from the Gershwins’ “I
told him he would make it, and Got Rhythm.”
make it big.
Berry also appeared in a dozen
A fan of blues, swing and boo- movies, doing his distinctive bent-
gie woogie, Berry studied the very legged “duck-walk” in several
mechanics of music and how it teen exploitation flicks of the ’50s.
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