Now I need to know the backstory of why Chuck Berry and Pete Townshend were wearing hardhats and playing shovels with a crowd of TV reporters around them sometime in the late '80s/early '90s.
Kurt Cobain’s gravesite?
They came to praise Kurt, not to bury him.
Kurt wasn’t buried. He was cremated, and five years later his daughter scattered his ashes in McLane Creek outside Olympia.
So it’s not that.
BTW
It’s from the groundbreaking for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Comparisons across periods of time and styles don’t mean much. I’ll say he wasn’t great technically, because some of his peers were much better guitarists, but he was great in a historical sense, because he was among the first to do what he did, and he did it very well. The whole of his talents should probably be considered. His lyrics and showmanship were outstanding, and he overcame a lot of challenges. Right place/time? Yeah, but also the right person.
Berry nicked his best riff from Calvin Klein.
That was gonna be my guess. 
As for Berry, I don’t know that I’d call him a great guitar player. Above average though, and certainly an innovator. Think of the scene in Back To The Future when Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck while Marty McFly is onstage playing Johnny B. Goode. It’s an obvious nod to the fact that Berry was a rock-‘n’-roll pioneer, doing things that had not been done before and changing the face of popular music.
Or maybe @Jackmannii was arguing along these lines:
Chuck Berry was great.
Chuck Berry was a guitar player.
Therefore, Chuck Berry was a great guitar player.
Golf clap, well played.
I think it was the Django Reinhardt reference.
Anyway, I look forward to a future thread in which John Lennon’s guitar playing is pooh-poohed, because Les Paul.*
And a discussion of how George Gershwin wasn’t much of a piano player when you consider Vladimir Horowitz.
*and Django Reinhardt.
As a bit of explanation, I only brought up Django as a point of cultural reference, not to say Chuck wasn’t good because Django was better.
Sometimes a new zeitgeist will come along with no historical precedent. So allowances can be made for the learning processes. By the time Barry came along intricacies of guitar playing were well known. I could have picked any number of other examples. As noted upthread he had many contemporaries that were more competent (strictly from a technical standpoint).
Again, to those who’s feathers I’ve ruffled, I think Chuck Barry was great. He deserves most all I’d the accolades he’s given. But if the case is going made that he’s a great guitar player, it’s fair to examine that a bit closer.
Some of these posts in this thread have softened my stance a bit, for what it’s worth.
He was great too!
Guitar teacher: “Learn the opening riff to ‘Back In Black’. It’s E-D-D-D-A-A-A.”
14 Year Old Me: “Oh, that’s not so hard. In fact, that’s kinda easy!”
Guitar Teacher: “Yeah, but did you come up with it?”
To me Barry was more of a great rock songwriter/showman/figure than a guitar player, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t playing tasty licks and riffs, many of which went on to influence guitar players that were far more technically gifted than he was.
Sheesh, people, the name is Chuck Berry, BERRY.
I’m going to go for pioneering, innovative, groundbreaking, very important, and so forth. Great? He was certainly very, very good within a limited genre. I expect a great guitarist to be a master of the instrument with many techniques in several different genres. I’m not trying to dis him (and I love his music), but I don’t think of him as a “great” guitarist.
By this definition, Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Andres Segovia, Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, and many more were not ‘masters of the instrument.’
Actually, I would consider all of them to have a wider range than Berry, in style and genre. Now, I’m not saying that Berry COULDN’T play with wider variety, but I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that.
Obligatory Chuck Berry story: One of my friends in college in the early 70s was a member of a band that was hired to back-up Berry when he was in Boston on a tour. (He toured without a set band at that time.) When Berry showed up the afternoon of the show, my friend asked, “What songs are we going to play?” Berry replied in all seriousness, “Chuck Berry songs.”
There’s only so many genres for guitar. Also, I think we need to kind of recalibrate because there were unreal classical players that were for the most part, utterly technique-driven. Rock players are at the other end of that scale, many can’t read more than tablature and have never had any formal training.
Plus rock music is a way more recent phenomenon so there’s less of a sample size, but then…RECORDED music only goes back so far too. So there’s been innovations in the music, the playing, the amps, the guitars, the digitization of everything, etc, MacPro Tools, et al.
Hmm, I’d say he’s great. He at least popularized the style he played in greatly, and he launched a thousand careers. Would he be as great a guitarist if he had debuted 20 years later and the world somehow had developed along the same lines without him? Nope, but we are all men of our moment.
Yeah, I’ve liked Berry since I was a kid, but it’s seeing clips from that show over the years that has made me truly love him. He can put on a great show with a set of quite good Belgian session musicians. The man, even if he had foibles like us all, was an amazing entertainer. He may not fret a few notes perfectly, but he sells every one.