“Brown Eyed Handsome Man” (1956)

Mr. Berry said that this song — a sly and daring commentary on race relations — was written after an episode he witnessed outside a concert he was playing in California. (A Hispanic man was being handcuffed by the police when a woman ran up, screaming to let him go.) In typically masterful manner, Mr. Berry was able to draw effortlessly on the worlds of art (the Venus de Milo) and baseball to convey the wide-ranging allure of “brown-eyed” — barely encoded to mean “nonwhite” — men.

“Roll Over Beethoven” (1956)

A declaration of musical independence for a new generation, “Beethoven” was initially aimed at Mr. Berry’s younger sister, who monopolized the family piano practicing classical music. The rest, he said, came “out of my sometimes unbelievably imaginative mind.” Famous covers of the song include versions by the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis and Electric Light Orchestra. Leonard Cohen once compared the song to Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” adding that “if Beethoven hadn’t rolled over, there’d be no room for any of us.”

“Havana Moon” (1956)

The Latin rhythm was based on Nat King Cole’s “Calypso Blues,” while the setting was picked up from Mr. Berry’s exposure to New York City’s Cuban population while he was performing at the Paramount in Brooklyn and at the Apollo Theater. But the exotic feel was matched to a universal narrative, straight out of an O. Henry story.

“School Day” (1957)

By 1957, rock ’n’ roll’s teenage takeover was complete, and Mr. Berry responded with a song that directly targeted these new consumers — set in the focal point of their daily life, regardless of race or class. He wrote that the stop-and-start rhythm was meant to reflect the “jumps and changes” he experienced in high school, compared with the one room/one teacher structure of elementary school. The final verse gave Mr. Berry’s genre its greatest rallying cry (and became the title of his 1988 concert film): “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ roll!”

“Rock and Roll Music” (1957)

The music itself was Mr. Berry’s greatest subject, and greatest muse. Laying out the merits of rock ’n’ roll against modern jazz, tango and symphonies, the popping rumba rhythm proved its own argument — “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it.” The Beatles recorded a raucous version, and the Beach Boys had a Top 10 hit of this song that Mr. Berry intended to “hit the spot without question” and “define every aspect of [rock’s] being.”