Obituary: Chuck Berry, legendary guitarist and songwriter who fathered rock'n'roll

Lascivious, temperamental and unhinged, Chuck Berry created rock’n’roll in his image and blew a hole through the narrow discourse on culture and race forever. Bongani Madondo doffs his hat to the rascal from St Louis

The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards - himself no slouch in the crazy game of dare and death upon which 60 years of rock'n'roll mythology is built - once wrote to his hero, Chuck Berry:

"Dear Mr. Berry, Let me say that despite our ups and downs I love you, so! Your work is so precious and beautiful."

"Keef" concluded his scribbled note, mapped with a riot of exclamation marks: "My love to you, brother! PS: Your English is better than mine!"

The Richards-Berry black and white bromance, between the grateful younger white protégé and the sulking older black musical master, lasted decades, albeit clouded with rancour and heaving with earnestness and racial desire hardly explored outside the heartbreakingly blunt world of rock' n'roll.

Writing in Rolling Stone magazine in 2011 for the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time Special Issue, Richards makes clear his appreciation and appropriation of Berry and the entire black world's musical culture.

He tells a little anecdote: "When I saw Chuck Berry one summer day as a teenager, he was playing on with a bunch of jazz guys. Ooohwee, were they brilliant! Guys like Philly Jo Jones on drums, Jack Teagarden on trombone, but man they all had that jazz swagful attitude jazz cats put on sometimes.

"Chuck took them all by storm and played against their animosity. I listened to every lick he played, and picked it up. Chuck got it from T-Bone Walker and I got it from Chuck, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and BB King.

"To me that's the blues. That's the guts it takes to stand your ground. That's what I wanted to be, 'xcept I was white.

"That son of a bitch Chuck just turned 85. I wish I could just pop in on him and say: 'Hey Chuck, let's have a drink together or something.' But he ain't that kind of a cat."

That's what Richards wanted to be, 'xcept he was white. He still is. And filthy rich.

If you are a raging Fallist or black cultural scholar on a decolonialist trip, you can rightfully riff that the likes of Richards struck pay dirt and got filthy rich on the back of hundreds of years of African cultural genius, and you would be right.

But that's just part of the story, emotionally attractive as it might be.

Richards was part of what was known as the "British Invasion", a movement of mid-1960s blues- and jazz-inspired white teens clutching guitars and the desire to master the mystical arts of music mimetic of obscure 1940s-1960s African-American innovators such as Slim Harpo, Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and Screaming "Jay" Hawkins, who famously composed I Put a Spell on You, made famous by Nina Simone.

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But the kids did more than steal the black sonic arts. They popularised stolen ancient African and Asiatic cultures into what is now modern popular culture. In other words, they alchemised loot into lucre and voodoo into psychedelia, and we are all the better for it.

They in turn owe everything to the descendants of Africans brought to the "new world" as human cargo by forebears of the "British Invasion".

Invasion. Conquest. Conquistadores. History is littered with those words and they stink like funk. They also tell stories of one race and one continent's determination to build its civilisation in the most barbaric, if profitable, of ways.

In the story of the development of rock'n'roll and the root-seed of modern-day pop as musical and style expression, all that cultural transaction can be chalked up to the impact of Chuck Berry, who died last Saturday at the age of 90.

So who was Chuck Berry and why should he matter?

Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born on October 18 1926 in St Louis, Missouri - same year as Miles Davis, who also spent time in the city.

Chuck's ol' man, Henry William Berry snr, helped maintain the family through jobs such as carpentry and construction. His mother, Martha Banks Berry, a "college-educated Negro", taught English at high schools in the area.

Chuck Berry suckled his love for poetry - upon which he built his notoriously whimsical, naughty and incendiary road-man-poetics songbook - from his eloquent mother.

Culture critic Greg Tate imagines that "had the guitar not become a teenage obsession, Berry might have spun his wordsmith's skill into a literary career. Just like his fellow state's scribes Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison."

Like them, Berry knew from the get-go that he would never settle for a life as Invisible Man.

He learnt guitar from school, lyrics from Mama and a raw, blues-inflected lethal and sadistic humour from the tough streets of the bigoted American South. He grew up doing menial jobs and, sometimes, crimes - stealing cars, working in a beauty salon - but music was uppermost in his soul.

After working in a nightclub he developed his unique style of guitar picking, reclaiming the basic chord structures from the equivalent of rooinek culture, Southern early country, itself a variation of the blues.

In his hands, white country style - merged with provocative lyrics and a prancing quack-quack duckling style, one foot up, hoppin' and skippin' around the stage - became a signature African-American pop language from which issued what we now consensually refer to as rock'n'roll.

Using the same cultural formula - and at around the same time as Berry was fathering rock'n'roll - displaced "New Africans" in South Africa were blending traditional sounds with kwela to create umbaqanga.

For reasons that had much to do with his rebellious streak, and probably the era's charming and yet misogynistic norm too, Berry was drawn to penning deeply affective ditties with suggestive titles, or bearing women's names: Beautiful Delilah, Carol, Maybellene, Nadine and My Ding-A-Ling.

In 1959 he was arrested for transporting an underage girl across state lines. Some said he had picked up a sex worker, some said the girl was in his employ, but whatever she was, she was in her teens.

Like many artists of colour, he also used art to subvert strictures that frowned upon relationships across the colour bar. For him that meant squiring an inordinate share of eager white damsels, most of them fans of this black man whose African-derived music rendered them shriekful and helpless and ultimately panty-less.

Aw, Chuck. Rock on by!

• Madondo is an associate research fellow at the Wits Institute of Social & Economic Research and author of "Sigh, the Beloved Country: Braai talk, rock-n-roll and other stories" (Picador Africa)