Waiting for my college composition students to assemble Wednesday morning, I mentioned to my class that it was Chuck Berry’s birthday, his 80th. “You know, Chuck Berry, right?” I asked.

Well, as it turned out, no,they didn’t know Chuck Berry. Not one student recognized the name, and just one student knew the song title “Johnny B. Goode.”

Now, I’ve been teaching long enough to not really be surprised any longer when my common currency turns out to be non-negotiable tender in the minds of my students. And really, why should today’s 18 to 22 year olds know who Chuck Berry is? If they didn’t grow up in homes with Chuck Berry in their parents’ record collections–and of course that’s quite possible as most of their parents were born in the mid sixties–or if they hadn’t been forced to listen to a pop oldies station all day long at some after school job, how would they know Chuck Berry? I mean, to go for something like an equivalent example from my own life, would I have known who, say, Louis Armstrong was when I was their age?

Well, as a matter of fact, I did know who he was, even before he guested on The Flip Wilson Show, but for whatever reason, I was a music kid and most of my classmates weren’t. I’d guess most of them wouldn’t have known Satchmo from shinola. Well, of course not. Why would they?

Still, I was fairly dumbfounded that Chuck Berry–Chuck Berry!–was unknown to all twenty of the kids in this class, and all but one of the 18 kids in another section that I posed the question to this morning. In the latter section, I tried to explain a bit of who Berry was, at least wave in the direction of his significance. I ended with John Lennon’s famous quote. (By the way, they knew Lennon…or most of them did. But there will a come a day, soon, when many or all of my students will shrug their shoulders at that name, as well). If you were going to name rock and roll anything else, Lennon said, you could just go ahead and call it “Chuck Berry.”

To which one student wondered aloud: “Why?”

This is the final installment in our Chuck Berry 80th birthday celebration. Let me use it to try and provide the the beginnings of one kind of answer to that question: Why would Chuck Berry be a good name for rock and roll?

Not because he invented the genre. But he was among the very first to take the sound and its big back beat nationwide, and he is the iconic image of a singing electric guitar slinger. Indeed, for most of my life, one way that rock and roll acts have identified themselves as rock and rollers was to cover Chuck Berry or, even more often, to build a sound upon some aspect or other of Berry’s sound. The Beatles, Stones, and Animals; the Beach Boys, Hendrix and CCR; Lynyrd Skynyrd and Springsteen and Prince and so many others.

Berry’s guitar style, and in particular what is now called the “Johnny B. Goode” lick, twangy and rhythmic and bluesy all at once, has been lifted and interpolated an infinite number of times. It is synomous with the genre. That it’s not common currency today is, perhaps, one more sign that what we think of as the rock and roll era is on its way out, or already gone.

Berry lifted that lick himself from a Lous Jordan record, but as Barry Mazor has noted in the comments section, Jordan just “lets that intro energy drop right off into a slower, steadier jump blues rhythm as soon as the song starts. Chuck–well, Chuck keeps driving at the same frantic pace.” Jordan’s band uses the lick like a shout: “Hey, listen up to what Louis is gonna say!” Berry uses it that way too, but it turns out that the lick is what he has to say, or an awfully big part of it.

It’s called the “Johnny B. Goode” lick, but the “Roll Over Beethoven” lick is more accurate; “Roll Over” appeared more than two years earlier, after all. But whatever we call it, it’s shown up again and again throughout rock and roll history.

Two examples will have to suffice: The Beach Boys lift it nearly note for note for “Fun, Fun, Fun,” but they also make it less weighty and urban, lighter and whiter and sub-urban. LL Cool J brings it back to the city, by way of highlighting his DJ, Cut Creator, who samples that “Go Johnny, Go” lick reapeatedly, a great example of the way sampling can redeploy the coolest sounding parts of old records.

“Rap brings back old R&B,” the rap group Stetsasonic once rhymed. “And if we had not, people coulda forgot.”

“Go Cut Creator, Go,” indeed. And Johnny too.

Louis Jordan & His Timpani Five “Ain’t that Just Like a Woman” (Decca, 1946) available on The Roots of Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry “Roll Over Beethoven” (Chess, 1956) and “Johnny B. Goode” (Chess, 1958) available on The Chess Box

Beach Boys “Fun, Fun, Fun” (Capitol, 1964) available on Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys

LL Cool J “Go Cut Creator Go” from Bigger and Deffer (Def Jam, 1987)

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