Chuck Berry, the legendary “Father of Rock ’N’ Roll,” died at his home in Missouri on Saturday, said police in St. Charles County, just north of St. Louis.
He was 90 years old.
The composer and guitar innovator was known for the hits “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “My Ding-a-Ling,” “Maybellene” and “Sweet Little Sixteen” — chart-toppers that endure to this day.
The St. Charles Police Department said on its Facebook page that cops responded to a report of a medical emergency at Berry’s home at 12:40 p.m.
“Inside the home, first responders observed an unresponsive man and immediately administered lifesaving techniques,” the police posting said.
“Unfortunately, the 90-year-old man could not be revived and was pronounced deceased at 1:26 p.m.”
Police confirmed Berry’s identity and said his family requested privacy.
Berry was a major influence on generations of musicians, particularly on early rockabilly stars such as Jerry Lee Lewis and British Invasion bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Berry’s music mixed blues and rhythm-and-blues, but had crossover appeal with white teens because his lyrics touched on what biography.com called “the universal themes of youth.”
“I made records for people who would buy them,” Berry once explained. “No color, no ethnic, no political — I don’t want that, never did.”
“He was singing good lyrics, and intelligent lyrics, in the ’50s when people were singing, ‘Oh, baby, I love you so,’ ” John Lennon once observed.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Stones’ founding members, met and bonded over Berry records as schoolboys.
Berry in 1986 became the first member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted by Richards, who produced a tribute film about the pioneer’s career, “Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll,” the next year.
“Your work is so precious and beautifully timeless,” Richards wrote in a note to his idol in 2005. “I’m still in awe!”
Berry, who toured solo for decades, was known for performing with a new pick-up band in every town.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band served as his backup crew at a show in College Park, Md., in 1973.
In his last two decades, he played 209 consecutive monthly shows at the Blueberry Hill club in St. Louis, from 1996 until 2014.
But even back in 2012, in an interview for Rolling Stone magazine, he was lamenting his waning health, complaining, “My singing days have passed. My voice is gone. My throat is worn. And my lungs are going fast.
“I’m wondering about my future,” he told the mag.
He was born Charles Anderson Edward Berry in St. Louis in 1926, to Martha and Henry Berry, who were the grandchildren of slaves.
His neighborhood was so segregated, Berry was 3 years old when he first saw white people — several firefighters putting out a fire.
“I thought they were so frightened that their faces were whitened from fear,” he once remembered, according to biography.com.
Berry became entranced by the blues as a teen after a childhood spent singing in his church choir.
He learned guitar, but after being convicted of armed robbery at age 17, spent three years in a reformatory and didn’t take up music again until the early 1950s.
He built a career as a guitarist in the black jazz clubs of his deeply segregated hometown, blending country-guitar licks, jazz-piano chords, and a rhythm-and-blues beat into a wholly new art form.
Even before his recording career took off, he was forging the course of rock music, crafting lyrics that spoke to teenage listeners and remain fresh decades later.
His song “School Day” told of the sing-song trials of the classroom (“American history and practical math; you’re studying hard, hoping to pass . . .”) and the liberation of rock ’n’ roll once the day’s final bell rang.
“Roll Over Beethoven” was an anthem to the revolution that rock brought to music, while “Rock and Roll Music” was a guidebook for all bands that followed (“It’s got a back beat, you can’t lose it”).
Music historians mark 1955’s “Maybellene,” Berry’s first single — which hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — as the world’s first blast of rock ’n’ roll.
He’d spend another 20 months in jail after his 1961 conviction for transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes” after he brought a 14-year-old prostitute from Mexico to St. Louis to work at his club.
Berry’s high-energy stage presence was as indelible as his music.
His signature “duck walk” move, instantly recognizable decades after he invented it, was memorably imitated by Michael J. Fox in 1985’s “Back to the Future,” and by thousands of other performers.
In 2012, when Berry granted an interview on a rare trip to Cleveland to accept the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s American Music Masters Award, he noted modestly that the crowds who attended his monthly shows were not there to see his chops, which he described as not what they used to be.
“I’ll tell you what that is,” Berry said. “They’re having a great time from memory.”
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