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Actor,
Sam
Waterston, said, "He gave us thrill-hungry teens a language of our
own and the music to fire a revolution."
Goldie
Hawn introduced Berry. She
said she had grown up listening to classical music and promised her
father that it would always be her favorite music
—
that
she would never like rock 'n' roll. Then, she said, she turned 13
(in 1958)
—
and
things started happening to her. Hawn
said that Berry had “reached
out to a generation” and, together with Elvis Presley, inspired her to pursue her dream. She called him the "poet laureate of rock 'n' roll"
and
then,
Hawn got a broad
smile and a thumbs up from the ever cool
Mr. Berry when she told him that no one ever said it better
than
he
did when he sang,"Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky
the news."
Everyone
knows Chuck
Berry "could play a guitar just like a-ringin' a
bell." Everyone knows he is generally regarded as both the greatest guitarist and the
greatest lyricist of rock 'n' roll's pioneer generation and was the first
in a long line of rock 'n' roll singer-songwriters and one of the best
of all times. Quite
appropriately among the
very first round of inductees in 1986 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his influence on others that
followed is widely acknowledged and undeniable.
According
to several newspaper reports, published December 4th, the day after the Kennedy Center event:
Los
Angeles Times:
Berry,
74, was cited for his role in helping to create the hard-charging rock
'n' roll sound that has dominated popular music for five decades.
Washington
Post:
But perhaps the most
far-reaching toast of the evening [which was unfortunately edited out of
the television broadcast] came from composer Marvin Hamlisch, who
toasted Berry as the one figure who, as much as anyone, can lay claim to
the invention of rock-and-roll.
As a boy
in New York, he said, "I was taught the music of the three B's
— Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. But as a
teenager, I lived with the fourth B
— Chuck Berry." Noting
Berry's early fusion of country and western guitar riffs with jazz and
rhythm and blues, Hamlisch said, as an American, "I'm as proud of
Chuck Berry as I am of George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein."
At
the end of the Berry tribute, “Little Richard and an all-star ensemble
paid musical homage to Chuck Berry … [and] brought the whole hall to
their feet, including the president.”
As
the audience filed out, you could almost hear the mental loop playing
in everyone's heads:
"Roll over, Beethoven, and tell
Tchaikovsky the news."
Chuck,
in
1957, you said, "Maybe someday, your name will be in
lights." But did you ever dream of anything like
this?
The Class of
1960 offers its sincere thanks to you, Chuck Berry. We are deeply grateful to
you for helping to make
our teenage years so very special
— and
for entertaining us and keeping us rocking
— yes,
and keeping us young
—
for
the last 45.
Chuck, you are the man!!
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Rock
on, |
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Johnny B. Goode! |
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