What do you love about music?

To begin with?

Everything. Putting on a great show is the most important thing you can do. One great rock show can change the world. Without Chuck Berry, there is no rock and roll. I'm Greg Kott and I'm Jim De Origatus.

This week we remember the life, music, and legacy of the pioneering guitarist, songwriter, and rock and roll legend, Chuck Berry. That's all coming up to sound opinions. I'm Greg Cot with Jim Deeregatus and typically at this time of year

we are doing our South by Southwest Music Conference wrap-up from Austin, Texas. Jim and I just returned from there and we will do that show in another week but even bigger news this

week to talk about the death of Chuck Berry it is not an overstatement to say

that he is one of the, if not the, key figure in the evolution

of rock and roll in the 20th century, a figure that ranks up there with stylists along

the lines of Louis Armstrong who played a key role in the

invention of jazz or Bill Monroe and Bluegrass Thomas Dorsey and Gospel.

W.C. Handy and Blues Chuck Berry played a similar role in the way rock and roll evolved.

There is rock and roll such as we knew it before Chuck Berry and then after.

Not only as a singer and performer, he was a great, great showman, but as a guitar player influencing every

guitar player, every electric guitar player who ever picked up the instrument afterward,

and most of all as a songwriter the

subject matter of those songs influencing the way rock and roll was viewed as a

music of freedom and also as the leader of a small combo

that played an up-tempo blend of blues and country

with a heavy backbeat.

Virtually every rock and roll band

that has been invented ever since has followed the format that Chuck

Berry ingrained in our consciousness in the 1950s.

...