Chuck Berry must have been listening when a teenage Goree Carter & His Hepcats released Rock Awhile in 1949.

Five or six years later he built an entire career on that sizzling electric guitar riff that crackles through an overdriven amplifier at the start.

Even before the boogie-based rhythm comes in, that’s enough for Carter’s self-penned song, recorded in Houston, Texas, to be cited as the starting point for rock’n’roll.

It was the 18-year-old Carter’s debut single but he had been playing since he was a small boy. He had grown up listening to his older sisters’ records by T-Bone Walker and first performed under the stage name Little T-Bone.

His father, a pianist and trumpeter, regularly hosted jam sessions with saxmen with names like Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb.

His career had barely begun when it was cut short when, still only 19, he was drafted into the US Army a year after this song came out, and fought in the Korean War.

It never reallly picked up again upon his return to Houston and he moved back into his childhood home with his mother, going back to work at the local rice mill where he had had his first job to support her.

He still played occasional local gigs in Houston and his last was in 1970 when he sat in with visiting artist B.B.King who had cited him as an influence on his own guitar playing.

Afflicted by arthritis in later years, he died in 1990 in the same house where he had been born, at the age of only 59.