## The Storyteller of the Teenager
Chuck Berry was the primary architect of the rock and roll guitar style and its most important songwriter. With ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Maybellene’, he created the template for the teenage experience in the 1950s. He was a poet of the electric guitar, combining clever lyrics with rhythmic riffs that influenced every musician from Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen.
## March 18, 2017
At the age of 90, Chuck Berry was found dead at his home in Missouri. He had been active almost until the very end, recently announcing the release of his first new album in nearly 40 years. His passing marked the end of the first generation of rock and roll icons, leaving a world that he had helped to shape with his songs and his duckwalk.
## Go, Johnny Go, Forever
Chuck Berry’s legacy is in every guitar solo ever played on a rock station. He gave the genre its vocabulary and its attitude. He proved that rock and roll was a form of literature as well as and entertainment. Chuck Berry is gone, but his music is literally traveling to the stars on the Voyager spacecraft. The Poet Laureate has put down his pen, but his stories will never grow old.