Music has lost some true legends over the past year and a half. Yesterday Chuck Berry passed away and his loss is seemingly incalcuable. The tributes have already come pouring in from all over and his influence is impossible to comprehend I believe. There will always be a debate who started Rock & Roll but to me Chuck Berry was the truest pioneer. More than Elvis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis no one played guitar like that before him and his songwriting was so precise, it encapsulated the very essence of Rock & Roll. All of the platitudes of the genre can be traced back to year zero and Chuck Berry songs.
I’ll leave an excerpt here of a quote from Bob Dylan from a RollingStone interview back in 2009 regarding Chuck Berry. He says it better than I ever could:
“Chuck said to me, ‘By God, I hope you live to be 100, and I hope I live forever,'” Dylan says with a laugh. “He said that to me a couple of years ago. In my universe, Chuck is irreplaceable. All that brilliance is still there, and he’s still a force of nature. As long as Chuck Berry’s around, everything’s as it should be. This is a man who has been through it all. The world treated him so nasty. But in the end, it was the world that got beat.”
R.I.P. Chuck Berry
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