What an innovator. Duck-walking through the ether, now.
He invented rock and roll, and outlived many of the stars it created. Long before I had ever seen his duckwalk, I knew that he had been a major source of inspiration for the Beatles, and even more so for AC/DC. I believe it was Angus Young who said that his own epileptic guitar solos (which included a lot of duckwalking) were all just Chuck Berry riffs played at triple speed, and even Judas Priest honored him with a cover of Johnnie B. Goode.
And don’t forget Marty McFly, aka Calvin Klein, who borrowed Marvin Berry’s guitar and helped “influence” Chuck’s style, back from the future. 
Indeed Chuck Berry was an inspiration. I watched some video of him the other day and was reminded that he was doing something totally different from anyone else at the time. Kind of like Jimmi Hendrix in his time, but more so.
I believe that Chuck Berry was badly served by the tendency of critics and historians to want to write about the overlooked and underappreciated, the voices crying in the wilderness or the greatest whatever you’ve never heard of. He was due more credit than he got as a performer, guitarist, singer, and especially as a songwriter–though he got a lot–because he was always just too obvious.
Add to that the Beach Boys, whose first top-10 hit, “Surfin’ USA” is co-credited to Chuck, and really is an alternative set of lyrics to “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The Rolling Stones too; no greater admirer, or imitator, of Chuck Berry, than Keith Richards.
It’s pretty well known that he made a name for himself in the early 1950s playing own versions of “hillbilly songs” for mostly black audiences around St. Louis, and I’m pretty sure I hear a lot of Bill Monroe’s mandolin in his solo playing style. His rhythm playing sounds to me like it come out of “The Boogie Woogie,” which all the guys my father’s age could play on the piano if they could play anything, but he made it into something uniquely his own.
It says a lot about the universality of music, and how artificial genre boundaries are, when people like Buck Owens and Emmylou Harris had some of their biggest hits covering Chuck Berry songs.
The first thing I did after reading that Chuck Berry died was listen to some of his music on the Internet. I expected to be more excited, but that was not the case. I will have to go back and listen to his music, again. My problem with Chuck Berry isn’t the man or his music, but rather the fact that his style has been copied ad nauseam.
There’s a quote I can’t find on the internet. I think it was attributed to the guitarist Steve Vai. He said he could play the exact solos of Hendrix, with all the nuances included. The only problem was, he couldn’t figure out how Hendrix conceived of the solos in the first place.