Growing up, I never listened to English music. I was more into Motown, as well as early rock n' roll like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Alex Winston
My all-time favorite rock and roll players were Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry and Franny Beecher, and I listened to the country playing of Merle Travis.
Alvin Lee
Blues is a big part of rock and roll. The best rock and roll got its birth in the blues. You hear it in Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
Angus Young
Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.
I plug into a lot of old rock & roll. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis - I love all that stuff.
What we admit to is being a rock n' roll band. From day one, I was a big Chuck Berry fan.
I would listen to Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, and I would listen to how they played their riffs, and after I taught myself that, I taught myself to play my own kind of stuff.
Brian Wilson
My favorite guitar players are Chuck Berry and Brian May and Dave Davies from the Kinks.
Brittany Howard
I found a sound that people really liked - I found this basic concept and all I did was change the lyrics and the melody a little bit. My songs, if you listen to them, they're quite a lot alike, like Chuck Berry.
Buck Owens
To a crowd that loves improv, Robin Williams is like Chuck Berry.
Chris Gethard
I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm not Chuck Berry or Bill Monroe. Guys like that are from outer space.
Chris Stapleton
That's the misconceptions that people have, that Chuck Berry went to jail. They're just totally wrong. It might have said something in the large papers in the bigger city headlines and things. But, you take a look at any of the local papers, and you will see that I was acquitted. I never went to jail.
Chuck Berry
Maybe it is true what they say, that playing these Chuck Berry songs is easy. But try singing them. The words come out hard, like bullets.
Chuck Berry doesn't give interviews.
I was inspired by the classic rock radio of the Seventies. They separated Chuck Berry and the Beatles from the Led Zeppelins and Bostons and Peter Framptons of the time. In many ways, classic rock became bigger than mainstream rock.
Chuck D
When the fearsome foursome of rock music, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, decided to show up in Toronto for a rock and roll festival, I knew we had to go there to try to get them all on film.
D. A. Pennebaker
Venues had segregated seating - but when Chuck Berry fused together blues, boogie-woogie and country music, it caused people not to be able to sit still. They bounced up out of their seats, knocking over ropes, dancing together.
Daryl Davis
We would not have rock and roll without Chuck Berry, and when I first heard Chuck Berry, I fell in love with that music, and when I saw him, I changed my whole career trajectory that I was on as a kid.
Chuck Berry had a very profound impact on me. The man was a genius.
I've heard stories of pickup bands that can't follow, but here's the thing: If you want to play with Chuck Berry, you listen to his greatest hits and learn the format of the songs, but don't try to play it note-for-note.
This is no condemnation of Chuck Berry, who I greatly admire. But Chuck Berry's music will not translate as well to orchestration because of its very three-chord rock 'n' roll nature. It is the music of the artists that are more pretentious, pompous or closer to the kind of big dramatic stylings that orchestras are good with.
I'm influenced by Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelly, Roland Kirk, John Coltrane, B.B. King, and then by bluegrass. But when I was 16, bluegrass wasn't cool. We was rock n' rollers then: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis.
I was playing with Chuck Berry, who sounded like an English teacher. Did you ever listen to his records? He pronounces every word.
My first guitar was a Gretsch 6120, and I just loved listening to artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Stray Cats.
One summer I remember, I got exposed to Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Buddy Holly was a very very big, made a very big impression on me. Because of a lot of things, you know, the way he looked and his charisma.
I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.
The muse of music isn't just from Greek mythology, but living in people like the Beatles, Chuck Berry, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin.
Chuck Berry invented rock 'n' roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.
I really love what Chuck Berry did with Christmas music, and also the Rat Pack Christmas stuff, which I listened to all through my childhood.
Buddy Holly had something very different from the other great early rock n' roll stars, whether it was Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bo Diddley. He came across as so ordinary, as such a nerd. You know, he was a big guy, and he carried a gun. He was anything but a nerd.
After Chuck Berry died, it seemed web sites popped up like mushrooms to show where he'd taken the guitar introduction to 'Johnny B. Goode' from to prove that his music was nothing new, that it was only ignorance, or vanity, that led his listeners to think that not only was the music different - they might be, too.
Not to be mean about it, but some great rock and rollers, like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, are pretty one-dimensional.
We're gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we've got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry's piano player.
Back then, I, most rockers loved Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis... you know in the '60s.
Rock and roll came into my life when I was about 12, 13, when Little Richard and Chuck Berry had just started hitting the shores of England.
The first rock stars were incredibly theatrical. Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley - they were theater artists.
If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'.
I never liked blues and I really didn't like jazz. I liked Chuck Berry.
I was growing up at a time when music was growing and changing so fast. I had learned all the big band sounds of the 1940s, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. But then along came Chuck Berry, Les Paul, Fats Domino and I figured out how to make their music as well.
You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern.
Rock n' roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis - all them people.
One of my big inspirations was Chuck Berry, and his playing was always about the rhythm and the lyrics. So I've always been that way in my playing, really.
This kid's excited because he's with Bad Company and I'm excited because I'm with Chuck Berrys' son.
My influences were Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry.
If you're going to do Chuck Berry, you got to, you know, go all out, and the duck walk is just kind of you know, cursory. That's like standing.
My love of music comes from as long as I remember. I begged my mum to learn piano for a year when I was 4; she wanted to make sure I was serious, and I wanted to be Chuck Berry when I grew up! We were a very musical family; my mum would play guitar, and her, my dad and aunt would sing and harmonize!
Many people we consider legends, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, remain so scarred by scandals, injustices and regrets from decades earlier that they're barely able to appreciate their accomplishments.
I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.
There is a great book out called 'Everything I Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten,' and I believe that everything I ever needed to learn on guitar was in my first two years of hungry learning: Scotty Moore, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Lenny Breau, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Chuck Berry told me if it wasn't for Louis Jordan, he wouldn't have probably ever even got into music. That Louis Jordan changed everything and made him want to become a musician.
