Chuck Berry used the lyrics he wrote and the guitar riffs he composed to drive rock ‘n’ roll music to prominence.
Jimmy Breslin used the brilliance of his reporting and power of his words to shape a storytelling style that blended the literary devices of novelists with traditional journalism.
Berry, 90, and Breslin, 88, died last weekend with the stature of giants in their worlds of music and writing.
Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born in St. Louis where he grew up listening to gospel, blues and country music. Blending those styles and using a two-stringed guitar lick learned from T-Bone Walker, Berry’s music appealed to whites and blacks, and the rebellious streak in his lyrics made him popular with younger listeners during the 1950s.
Many of his songs became iconic hits of the early days of rock ‘n’ roll which remained remained favorites for decades: “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “School Day,” “Maybellene” and “Sweet Little Sixteen” among them.
During the 1960s, Berry influenced the West Coast surfing music popularized by the Beach Boys, as well as British bands, most notably the Beatles and Rolling Stones.
Mick Jagger tweeted: “I am so sad to hear of Chuck Berry’s passing. I wish to thank him for all the inspirational music he gave to us. He lit up our teenage years, and blew life into our dreams of being musicians and performers. His lyrics shone above others & threw a strange light on the American dream. Chuck you were amazing & your music is engraved inside us forever.”
Berry’s pioneering work was recognized with a Grammy Award in 1984 for lifetime achievement, and in 1986 he was among the first musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Those are earthly tributes to Berry. His music also is literally other-worldly. When the Voyager I and II exploratory spacecraft were launched in 1977 — they are now in interstellar space — their time capsules designed to explain Earth to extraterrestrials included a so-called golden record with music from various cultures and eras. The sole rock song is “Johnny B. Goode.”
James Earle Breslin grew up in the Richmond Hill section of Queens where he began reading newspapers as a boy and got his start in the business when The Long Island Press hired him as a copy boy.
As a sportswriter for the New York Journal-American, Breslin covered the first season of the New York Mets in 1962, and wrote the book “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” Born then was the maxim that shaped Breslin’s fabled storytelling as the preeminent news columnist for decades in New York City: Don’t follow the pack of reporters writing about the winning team, but find a better story in the losers’ locker-room.
He applied that lesson most famously in his 1963 column after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in which Breslin wrote about Clifton Pollard, the man who dug the president’s grave, only to be excluded from joining the graveside service. “Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour.”
Breslin was among a group of writers — including Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson — whose detailed narrative writing fueled the “New Journalism’’ that appealed to younger readers beginning in the 1960s.
Everyday people who otherwise would not have a voice in the newspaper, as well as corruption in New York City, were among Breslin’s favorite subjects. He won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for commentary which recognized his columns on topics as diverse as police torture in Queens and the life of an AIDS patient. The Pulitzer committee noted that Breslin’s writing “consistently championed ordinary citizens.”
Breslin wrote more than 20 books and worked for magazines, but was addicted to the daily deadlines of newspapers. “Once you get back in the newspapers, it’s like heroin,” he said. And he never stopped looking for the gravediggers. “I still pursue the art of climbing flights of stairs. Go to the scene. Go ring the doorbell and ask the guy. Nobody does that.”
Berry and Breslin helped shape the cultural landscape during the past six decades, and they leave a legacy defined by the influence they had on the generations who followed them.