Chuck Berry's brilliant lyrics and guitar riffs live on

That brown-eyed handsome man.

At least he thought so, was he making gentle fun of himself?  That both are true is the charm of many of Chuck Berry’s best songs.

I have fallen for his music twice. The first time was as a very young listener thrilled by “Johnny B. Goode,” but these simple tunes were soon swamped by heavier and progressively more decadent waves: Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin.  My tastes moved on, to the jazz-rock fusion of Frank Zappa (when he could restrain his ridiculous prurience) and John McLaughlin, and eventually to the classical music my mother adored.

My rediscovery of Chuck Berry, who died Saturday at age 90, arose out of a concern for my two young boys, who wanted to listen to music during our many hours driving to and fro. (There was only so much NPR they—or I—could take.)

After a few disasters trolling the FM rock stations (horrid music that prematurely expanded their vocabulary and carnal knowledge), I acquired Berry’s “Great Twenty-Eight” which happily did not include the regrettable ding-a-ling ditty. They delighted in them (except "Havana Moon," which they mockingly imitated), and I embraced the songs with new appreciation.

We laughed every time “Too Much Monkey Business” played, the boys, in part I suspect, because Berry was strangely familiar with a term that their father had surely coined, but mainly at his aspirated exasperation with the quotidian.

So many others tickle. I mean who doesn’t at least smile at his calling impudently into the grave for Beethoven to roll over “and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”

How about, “I looked at my watch, and to my surprise, I was dancing with a woman twice my size”?  In “Thirty Days,” he resorts to gypsy “hoodoos,” judicial warrants, and the FBI to get his woman back home, but, “If they don’t give me no consolation, I’m gonna take it to the United Nations,” which is funny on a couple of levels.

The familiar ringing riffs at the beginning of “Johnny B. Goode” highlight other songs, but most of those are quite distinctive. It’s the brief guitar breaks in “Carole,” for example, that give it a distinctive texture and grip.

There is cleverness in details that could easily be missed. “School Day” begins with the guitar ringing like an alarm clock jarring young sleepyheads into consciousness, followed immediately by a firm and rising “Up,” which might as well be a parental admonition.

The boys were too young at first to appreciate his obsession with girls, but I hoped that in these tunes there was healthy preparation for when they were so prompted. Girls are cute or sexy (“swinging like a pendulum, walking down the aisle”), but he complains of Maybelline’s unfaithfulness and rejects Delilah for her cruelly promiscuous ways: “You are so tantalizing, you just can’t be true…Let her steal his heart away and break it just for fun.”  Then there is pain of separation in earnestly plaintive “Memphis, Tennessee”: “With hurry-home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye.”

His characters are often frustrated by their unrequited longings, but if they happen to catch someone’s attention, the expressions of desire are (comparatively) innocent.  At worst: “With the one you love you’re making romance” but, “All day long you’ve been wantin’ to dance.” Dance!  Or to hold hands. Maybe neck, but then get married (his ultimate response to Delilah’s siren call).

He had a way of being true to youthful desire, infatuation, frustration, sadness, energy, and joy.  The characters, lyrics, and music are all ingenuously invested in the matter at hand.  And yet he could somehow keep us at just enough distance to invite amused self-awareness. Yet there is never, it seems to me, the detached and belittling irony that pervades the music to come.  On that point, consider Berry’s exuberantly celebratory “Back in the U.S.A.”

His songs are models of rhythmic unity. The cadences in the lyrics are layered perfectly over the basic beat and establish the specific spirit of the whole.  In isolation, the phrasing can seem convoluted and the analogies contrived.  But often these peculiarities delineate the character of the speaker and set the mood: “The last time saw Marie, she was waving me good-bye.”

None, I think, pulls these virtues together like “Nadine,” that is, one man’s desperate, principally vehicular, pursuit of his confidently declared “future bride” who evidently has not the least interest in him: “It seems like every time I see you, Darling, you got something else to do.”  (The “darling” is sheer genius.)

The undulating guitar line and the periodic blare of the horns put you amid heavy traffic. Rat-a-tat lyrics establish the frenetic urgency of the chase.  And the similes of this hapless lover are delightful: “I was campaign shoutin’ like a southern diplomat.”  “She moves around like a wave of summer breeze.” “Moving through traffic like a mounted cavalier, leaning out the taxi window, trying to make her hear.”  It’s a gem.

That Chuck Berry is dead is a cold fact. Every time I listen to these songs, though, he will still be “living in the USA.”

Stephen Wirls teaches political science at Rhodes College.