Imagine, if you will, aliens, gray ones, with those big eyes, traveling through the universe and finding a capsule in the sky, representing the people from the Planet Earth, a peaceful place (or so it looks from space).

On the capsule, the aliens find a recording — it is “Johnny B. Goode,” the 1958 ur-narrative of rock music, Horatio Alger as channeled through the experience of southern working-class youth. “He never learned to read or write so well,” sings Chuck Berry, who died on Saturday at ninety years old, “but he could play his guitar just like-a-ringin’ a bell.”

A sort of rock folk tale, young Johnny can’t do much except play guitar. Perhaps he’d sit by the train tracks and strum along with the implicit music of a train chugging by, and the engineers would gather from near and far to hear this country boy play. Seeing this, poignantly, his mother reminds him that some day his name would be in lights, but as far as we know, he’s just playing for the engineers down by the tracks, quite likely “on the wrong side,” as they say.