Police in St. Charles County, outside St. Louis, said they
were called to Berry's home by a caretaker and found him
unresponsive. Efforts to revive him failed and he was pronounced
dead at 1:26 p.m. local time.
Considered one of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll, Charles
Edward Anderson Berry was present at its infancy in the 1950s
and emerged as its first star guitarist and songwriter - a
nearly 30-year-old black performer whose style electrified young
white audiences and was emulated by white performers who came to
dominate American popular music.
Although Elvis Presley was called the king of rock 'n' roll,
that crown would have fit just as well on Berry's own carefully
sculpted pompadour.
Berry hits such as "Johnny B. Goode," "Roll Over Beethoven,"
"Sweet Little Sixteen," "Maybellene" and "Memphis" melded
elements of blues, rockabilly and jazz into some of the most
timeless pop songs of the 20th century.
He was a monumental influence on just about any kid who picked
up a guitar with rock star aspirations - Keith Richards, Paul
McCartney, John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen among them.
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Bob Dylan called Berry "the Shakespeare of rock 'n' roll," and
he was one of the first popular acts to write as well as perform
his own songs. They focused on youth, romance, cars and good
times, with lyrics that were complex, humorous and sometimes a
little raunchy.
Both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as well as the Beach
Boys and scores of other acts - even Elvis - covered Berry's
songs.
"If you tried to give rock 'n' roll another name," Lennon once
said, "you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
Paying tribute to Berry on Twitter on Saturday, Springsteen
called him "rock's greatest practitioner, guitarist, and the
greatest pure rock 'n' roll writer who ever lived." Rolling
Stones singer Mick Jagger tweeted: "Chuck you were amazing &
your music is engraved inside us forever."
When Richards inducted Berry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
in 1986, he said: "It's very difficult for me to talk about
Chuck Berry because I've lifted every lick he ever played. This
is the gentleman who started it all."
"GROWING OLD"
His death came five months after Berry announced plans to
release his first album of new music in 38 years some time in
2017 - a collection of mostly original material recorded and
produced by Berry, titled "Chuck" and dedicated to his wife of
68 years, Themetta "Toddy" Berry.
"My darlin' I'm growing old! I've worked on this record for a
long time. Now I can hang up my shoes," Berry wrote in a
statement for the occasion, coinciding with his 90th birthday.
Berry listed T-Bone Walker, Carl Hogan of Louis Jordan's band
and Charlie Christian from Benny Goodman's band among his guitar
influences, but his lyrical style was all his own.
Punchy wordplay and youth-oriented subject matter earned him the
nickname "the eternal teenager" early in his career. His legacy
was tarnished, however, by his reputation as a prickly
penny-pincher and various run-ins with the law, including
sex-related offenses after he achieved stardom.
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Berry came along at a time when much of the United States
remained racially segregated, but it was hard for young
audiences of any color to resist a performer who delivered such
a powerful beat with so much energy and showmanship.
Berry said he performed his signature bent-knee, head-bobbing
"duck walk" across more than 4,000 concert stages. He said he
invented the move as a child in order to make his mother laugh
as he chased a ball under a table.
Some critics suggested it was his former pianist, Johnnie
Johnson, who composed the tunes while Berry only penned the
lyrics. Johnson sued Berry in 2000 for song royalties, saying
they were equal collaborators on many of the hits, but the case
was dismissed on grounds that the statute of limitations had
expired.
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It was with Johnson that Berry first made his mark, playing at black
clubs in the St. Louis area at the musically ripe age of 27. Berry
started out filling in with Johnson's group, known as Sir John's
Trio, in 1953, and Johnson eventually acknowledged Berry's talent,
charisma and business acumen by allowing the group to evolve into
the Chuck Berry Trio.
At the suggestion of blues legend Muddy Waters, Berry auditioned for
Chess Records, the white-owned Chicago label that put out scores of
blues hits. The result was the rockabilly tune "Ida Red," which
became a hit after it was retitled "Maybellene" and discovered by
white audiences.
When the record came out, Berry said he was stunned to see that
pioneering rock 'n' roll disc jockey Alan Freed and another man he
had never met, Russ Fratto, were listed as co-writers of "Maybellene."
The shared credits deprived him of some royalty payments, but Berry
dismissed it at the time as part of the "payola" system that
determined which records got radio play in the 1950s. He later
regained all the rights to his compositions.
ONLY ONE NO. 1 HIT
Berry and Johnson collaborated for some 30 years on such rock
anthems as "School Days," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Back in the
U.S.A.," "Reelin' and Rockin'," "Rock & Roll Music," "No Particular
Place to Go," "Memphis" and "Sweet Little Sixteen."
However, Berry's only No. 1 hit was "My Ding-a-Ling," a throwaway
novelty song that seemed to be a juvenile sex reference.
Berry's reputation for being greedy and grouchy was evident in the
1987 documentary "Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll," which focused on a
60th-birthday concert that Keith Richards organized for him. The
filmmakers said Berry refused to show up for production each day
unless given a bag of cash.
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Berry was born Oct. 18, 1926, the third of six children whose father
was a contractor and church deacon and whose mother was a
schoolteacher. They lived in a relatively prosperous black section
of St. Louis known as the Ville.
In the first of his brushes with the law, Berry was sent to a
reformatory as a teenager for armed robbery. After his release at
age 21, he worked in an auto plant and as a photographer and trained
to be a hairdresser.
As he became a star, Berry irked some in St. Louis by acquiring
property in a previously white area and opening his own nightclub,
where another legal scrape nearly ended his career.
At a show in Texas in 1959, Berry had met a 14-year-old Native
American girl and hired her to work at the St. Louis club. She was
later fired and then arrested on a prostitution charge, which led to
Berry being convicted for violating the Mann Act, transporting a
woman across state lines for immoral purposes. He was sent to prison
in 1962 for a year-and-a-half and wrote several songs while
incarcerated, including "No Particular Place to Go."
Berry had more trouble in 1979 when he was convicted of tax evasion,
serving four months in prison, and in the 1990s when a number of
women accused him of videotaping them in the bathrooms of his
restaurant-club in Wentzville, Missouri.
While the hits did not keep coming for Berry, the tributes never
stopped, and he continued playing a monthly show at a St. Louis
nightclub into his late 80s. He received a Grammy award for lifetime
achievement in 1984 and his 1986 induction into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame made him part of the inaugural class.
Illustrating his influence, a recording of "Johnny B. Goode" was
included in a collection of music sent into space aboard the
unmanned 1977 Voyager I probe to provide aliens a taste of Earth
culture.
(Additional reporting by Patrick Rucker in Washington; Writing by
Bill Trott and Steve Gorman; Editing by Leslie Adler, Mary Milliken
and Paul Tait)
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