Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"

I'm currently listening to a compilation album of Chuck Berry (The Great Twenty-Eight).  Some of these songs are ones that I've started transcribing, so I'm making some progress on those.  I discovered something about a line in "Johnny B. Goode."  I'd always understood the last line of the first verse as "But he could play a guitar just like a-ringin' a bell," meaning that Johnny B. Goode could play guitar with the same ease with which anyone can play a bell, an extremely easy instrument to play.  However, in looking over my transcription, I realized that it could also be "But he could play a guitar just like a ring in a bell," meaning that he has an inherent ability.  Both are grammatically viable, but I think I actually like the second parsing better, since that inherent ability seems to be what the rest of the song is getting at.