Once upon a time, rock'n'roll was an idiom that enabled young people from humble circumstances to escape poverty and make a name for themselves. This was before scions of the landed gentry, masquerading as outcasts, began forming bands like the Wallflowers and the Strokes, producing a brand of music best described as plutocrap: cute, but extraneous.

Whatever its transcendent artistic import, music in its myriad manifestations - Montiverdi, Haydn, Duke Ellington, Howlin' Wolf, the Beatles - has traditionally been an art form that enabled people who weren't born rich to make a living, and not merely to whine about their skanky girlfriends. This is what makes Johnny B Goode such a special cultural artifact. Probably the first song ever written about how much money a musician could make by playing the guitar, no song in the history of rock'n'roll more jubilantly celebrates the downmarket socioeconomic roots of the genre.

The song was written by Chuck Berry while he was on tour in New Orleans in 1958. In the official version of events, supplied to Rolling Stone magazine by Berry himself, the song is autobiographical: A poor boy from a rustic corner of the Deep South with little education and few prospects masters the electric guitar and becomes the leader of a famous band. In fact, Berry was not from the Deep South; he grew up on Goode Street in Saint Louis, an unusually cosmopolitan Midwestern city with a rich musical tradition. Nor was he unschooled; he was the first and perhaps the last songwriter to use the word "omit" in a pop song (Little Queenie). And he was certainly not a hick from the sticks; he had a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology. What's more, the song was originally written for the famous pianist Johnnie Johnson, with whom Berry had worked for years. A half-century later, Johnson would sue Berry, contending that he had co-authored many of his colleague's hits, but the case was thrown out of court, as these cases usually are. Thus, other than not being from the South, or a yokel, or an illiterate, or white, or bearing the name "Johnny," Berry was exactly like the character in his most famous song.

Johnny B Goode was recorded in 1958 with a band that included the legendary bassist Willie Dixon, author of such classics as Spoonful and Back Door Man. It is ironic that Berry should have recorded so many of his hits with a band containing luminaries like Dixon, because throughout his career, Berry was notorious for showing up for his gigs backed by a local band he had hired cheap, sight unseen and with whom he had not rehearsed. These back-up bands included an outfit headed by the young Bruce Springsteen, who later recalled Berry's annoying habit of switching to difficult keys halfway through a song. Berry also once performed in Philadelphia with a band that boasted a harpsichord in its line-up. When Keith Richards organized his homage to the man whose guitar style he had been channeling since his teens - Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail, Rock'n'Roll - in 1987, part of the motivation was to see how the maestro would perform if accompanied by a band that actually knew his songs. The maestro performed quite well.

Johnny B Goode was released halfway through Dwight Eisenhower's dreary second administration, when black people were still routinely being lynched in the Deep South, so for obvious marketing reasons the original lyric "little coloured boy" was changed to "little country boy". One of the great ironies about Berry's very odd career is that the man who has had the single greatest influence on the music that middle-aged white men adore has had almost no influence on the development of black music in America. In this sense, he resembles Aaron Copland, a Brooklyn homosexual famous for writing music about cowboys.

Johnny B Goode was produced by Leonard and Phil Chess, founders of Chicago's celebrated Chess Records. Berry was introduced to the Chess brothers by blues legend Muddy Waters, who, according to one apocryphal tale, was busy painting the walls of the recording studio when a very young Mick Jagger popped by for a visit. The song spent 15 weeks on the American charts, though never rising higher than No 8. Many years later, Berry's original recording was inserted into a capsule and blasted into outer space, ostensibly to give extraterrestrials an idea what sorts of things this civilization was capable of. Actually, to provide a more balanced view of the things American civilization is capable of, the arbiters of interstellar taste should have included Piano Man and Captain Jack. Just to give the aliens an idea of what they were up against.