Instead of making a speech, Berry straps on Costello’s guitar and delivers a haphazard verse of “Johnny B. Paul Simon presents Berry’s award-which the event program says “reflect our passion for the intelligence, beauty and power of words” and celebrates these songwriters for “their creativity, originality and contribution to literature”-with a heartfelt, slightly rambling speech, reciting some of the rock and roll pioneer’s most evocative lyrics, which Berry admitted at the time he couldn’t hear.Ĭostello performs an impassioned, slowed-down version of Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go,” and Flanagan reads a congratulatory e-mail from Bob Dylan, who calls Berry “the Shakespeare of rock and roll” (adding, “Say hello to Mr. In truth, the spotlight mostly stays squarely on eighty-five-year-old Berry. The honorees are both dressed in their latter-day uniforms: Berry in a sailor’s cap and windbreaker, Cohen in a dark suit with a gray shirt, topped by a fedora. The first recipients of the award are Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen. The award committee, chaired by journalist/novelist/television executive Bill Flanagan, includes Bono, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Paul Muldoon (poet and poetry editor at the New Yorker), Smokey Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and Paul Simon. The occasion is the inaugural presentation of a new award for “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence,” given by PEN (Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists) New England. “The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself.” “Society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” she quotes him as saying in a 1963 address at Amherst College, honoring Robert Frost. This brisk February Sunday in 2012, President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, is opening a ceremony by invoking one of her father’s speeches. Pei building, situated in dramatic isolation on a reshaped former landfill. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum sits on the Columbia Point peninsula of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.
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