Most music fans who were there at the inception of rock and roll could probably tell you the moment that they heard Elvis Presley for the first time. There had been rumblings of teenage music taking over the charts, but the minute that tracks like ‘Hound Dog’ hit the airwaves with Presley shaking his hips, there was a new reigning king in town to take over the music world. Then again, Presley would have gladly relinquished his title whenever he saw Chuck Berry performing.
Because if you want to be more accurate, Berry is probably the blueprint that everyone stole from in the beginning. There had been artists before him who had made tunes like ‘Rock Around the Clock’, but those had their roots in blues and rockabilly a lot more than the style we know today.
The minute that ‘Johnny B Goode’ came on the radio, though, Berry was his own unique animal. Everything was still based on the same bluesy chord progressions, but his way of telling a story and showmanship onstage made him impossible to take your eyes off of for more than a few seconds.
And it’s not like Berry was putting in throwaway lyrics or anything, either. A lot of his finest songs are simplistic, yes, but it’s more about setting a scene than trying to write a novel within the span of a pop single. That was reserved for the folk singers of the world, so tracks like ‘School Days’ and ‘Johnny B Goode’ were a lot closer to the kind of stories that teenagers were actually living every day.
Although Presley took a lot of the glory from many black artists when he debuted, he admitted that the true originator had to be Berry, with Tom Jones recalling, “One night, Elvis said to me, ‘Chuck Berry’s playing tonight do you want to go see him?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So we go to see Chuck Berry where he was singing and playing and Elvis is looking at him on stage. Elvis turned to me and said, ‘There’s the real King of Rock and Roll up there right now.”
Even if Presley got most of the attention, he did manage to cover a fair bit of Berry’s tunes in his time. Going through his discography, his versions of ‘Rock and Roll Music’ and ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’ are some of the better entries in his catalogue, and looking at songs like ‘Jailhouse Rock’, it’s hard to think that it would have existed without Berry showing what could be done with that traditional bluesy riff.
Despite Berry not getting the same accolades that Presley saw, he did also earn praise once the British Invasion kicked in. The Beatles were always happy to play Berry tunes when coming up in their club days in Hamburg, and without Berry’s approach to lead guitar playing, half of Keith Richards’s fretboard vocabulary probably wouldn’t have existed.
More than anything, Berry taught everyone about the power behind teenage angst and rock and roll. Anyone can try to write love songs to their heart’s content, but once Berry sang about the power of his music, he had a long line of musical disciples trailing right behind him.
