Chuck Berry Quotes (1926-2017)

“Hail, hail rock and roll; deliver me from the days of old. Long live rock and roll; the beat of the drums, loud and bold. Rock, rock, rock and roll; the feelin' is there, body and soul.”

“I wanted to write about school because most of my audience at the particular time was of a school element.”

“As I was motorvatin' over the hill I saw Maybellene in a Coupe DeVille A Cadillac a-rollin' on the open road Nothin' will outrun my V8 Ford”

“Someday you will be a man, And you will be the leader of a big old band. Many people coming from miles around To hear you play your music when the sun go down Maybe someday your name will be in lights Saying Johnny B. Goode tonight.”

“I learned more from Chuck Berry about America than I could have from the U.S. Information Service in London.”

“Chuck Berry is the greatest of the rock and rollers. Elvis competes with Frank Sinatra, Little Richard camps his way to self-negation, Fats Domino looks old, and Jerry Lee Lewis looks down his noble honker at all those who refuse to understand that Jerry Lee has chosen to become a great country singer.”

“While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together.”

“In his 1958 masterpiece “Johnny B. Goode,” Berry created the ultimate rock-and-roll folk hero in just a few snappy verses. As we all know, Goode wasn’t pounding a piano, singing into a microphone, or blowing a sax. In his choice of the electric guitar, something sleek and of the moment, the fictional character of Goode would forge an image of the archetypal rocker, doing as much to shape the history of the instrument as any real-life figure ever has. The song’s opening riff is a clarion call — perhaps the greatest intro in rock-and-roll history. It was played by Berry on an electric Gibson ES-350T, and it indeed sounded “just like a-ringin’ a bell.””

“The first popular performer to sing, play and write his own material, Chuck Berry roared into rock and roll in 1955 with the country two-beat rhythms of “Maybellene” and claimed the genre for his own. His influences were similar to those of B.B. King but also include jump blues and country-and-western music. It was Berry’s songs from the late Fifties with cut boogie patterns—like “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode” and “Carol”—that realized electrically the guitar ambitions first dreamt by Robert Johnson. Berry’s tone—courtesy of a hollow-body Gibson through a tweed Fender amp—was raw and loud. This, along with his duckwalk, ringing double-stops and songs about cars and girls, grabbed the youth market. Tall and handsome, he brought the guitar as the “cool” instruments to a ready audience via appearances on TV and in movies, in a way that the Beatles would repeat in the early Sixties.”