Bo Diddley

• 1. Introduction

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  Bo Diddley stepped onto The Ed Sullivan Show on the 20th of November, 1955, and promptly ignored every instruction he had been given. He had been asked to perform "Sixteen Tons", a popular Tennessee Ernie Ford hit. Instead, he launched into his own self-titled debut single, the one that had just gone to number one on the R&B charts. Sullivan was furious and reportedly told him he would not last six months.

  He lasted more than fifty years.

  Born Ellas Otha Bates on the 30th of December, 1928, in McComb, Mississippi, he grew up to reshape the sound of American music with a rhythm so elemental that scholars traced it to sub-Saharan African bell patterns. Yet he sold his song rights early and received no royalties from the most successful portion of his career until 1989. When he died on the 2nd of June, 2008, the tributes came from Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, B. B. King, and Robert Plant. His long-time bassist put it plainly: he was the rock that the roll was built on.

• 2. From McComb to Chicago

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  Ethel Wilson was sixteen years old when Bo Diddley was born, and she knew she could not raise him. She gave permission to her cousin, Gussie McDaniel, to bring up her son. McDaniel eventually adopted him, and he took her surname, becoming Ellas McDaniel.

  When Diddley was five, his adoptive father Robert died in 1934, and Gussie moved the family to the South Side of Chicago. There, the boy found two very different musical worlds pulling at him. At Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, he studied the trombone and then the violin, becoming skilled enough that the musical director invited him to join the orchestra. He played in it until he was 18.

  But the music that truly gripped him was coming from a local Pentecostal church nearby. The frenetic, trance-inducing rhythms of Sanctified worship services lodged themselves deep in his ear. He took up the guitar and built his early approach around that church-driven energy. He would later say that the trance-like quality in his rhythm and blues came directly from those Sanctified services in his Chicago neighborhood. His first recordings reflected that inheritance.

• 3. Building the Beat

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  In the summers of 1943 and 1944, a teenage Ellas McDaniel was playing at the Maxwell Street market with a band that included Earl Hooker. He was watching how rhythm could hold a crowd without a single chord change, without harmonic tension and release. The rhythms themselves created the excitement.

  The beat he eventually made famous is essentially the clave rhythm, one of the most common bell patterns in sub-Saharan African music traditions. One scholar found it in thirteen rhythm and blues recordings from the years 1944-55, including two by Johnny Otis from 1948. The Andrews Sisters had recorded "Rum and Coca Cola", which contains the Bo Diddley beat, in 1944. Three years before his own breakthrough record, a song with similar syncopation titled "Hambone" was cut by the Red Saunders Orchestra.

  Diddley came across the specific phrasing while trying to play Gene Autry's "(I've Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle". He also connected it to hambone, the percussive street performance style where players slap and pat their arms, legs, chest, and cheeks while chanting rhymes. Scholar Ned Sublette noted that the debut record had to be understood as a Latin-tinged recording: a rejected cut from the same session was titled only "Rhumba" on the track sheets, and the maracas played by Jerome Green were a marker of that influence.

  In late 1954, Diddley teamed up with harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold, drummer Clifton James, and bass player Roosevelt Jackson to record demos of "I'm a Man" and "Bo Diddley". They re-recorded the songs at Universal Recording Corp. for Chess Records, with Otis Spann on piano, Lester Davenport on harmonica, Frank Kirkland on drums, and Green on maracas. The record was released in March 1955. "Bo Diddley" went to number one on the R&B chart.

• 4. The Stage Name and Its Shadows

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  Nobody agreed on where the name came from. McDaniel himself said his peers gave it to him, and he suspected it was an insult. "Diddly" is a truncation of "diddly squat", meaning absolutely nothing. He also said it first belonged to a singer his adoptive mother knew. Harmonicist Billy Boy Arnold said it had been a local comedian's name, which Chess Records founder Leonard Chess adopted as McDaniel's stage name and the title of his first single. McDaniel added yet another version: his school classmates in Chicago had given him the nickname while he was sparring with the Little Neighborhood Golden Gloves Bunch.

  The name had older echoes that Diddley may not have known about. In Zora Neale Hurston's 1921 story "Black Death", a womanizing character named Beau Diddely meets his end at the hands of a hoodoo man. Hurston submitted the story to a contest run by the academic journal Opportunity in 1925, where it won an honorable mention but was never published in her lifetime.

  The word also pointed to a homemade instrument. The diddley bow is a single-string device that survived in the American Deep South, particularly in Mississippi, played mainly by children. In its simplest form, a length of broom wire was nailed to the side of a house, with a rock used as a movable bridge, and played like a bottleneck guitar. Scholars traced its origins to the monochord zithers of central Africa, the same continent whose bell patterns underpinned the rhythm that would make the name famous worldwide.

• 5. Mentorship and the Road

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  Diddley included women in his band in an era when that choice drew notice. Peggy Jones, known as Lady Bo, played lead guitar, a role that was rare for a woman at that time. Norma-Jean Wofford, known as The Duchess, Gloria Jolivet, and Cornelia Redmond, known as Cookie V, were also part of his touring ensemble.

  His reach as a mentor extended beyond his own band. After moving from Chicago to Washington, D.C., Diddley built a home recording studio in the basement of his house at 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE. One of the first groups he recorded there was a local doo-wop outfit called the Marquees, featuring a young Marvin Gaye and baritone-bass Chester Simmons, who also moonlighted as Diddley's chauffeur. The Marquees performed at talent shows at the Lincoln Theatre, and Diddley, impressed by their vocal delivery, let them rehearse in his studio.

  He tried to sign them to Chess Records but failed. He then got them a deal with OKeh Records, a Columbia subsidiary that rivaled Chess in the R&B market. On the 25th of September, 1957, he drove the group to New York City to record "Wyatt Earp", a novelty song written by the Marquees' lead singer Reese Palmer. Diddley produced the session and backed them with his own band. The single did not chart. But Diddley then persuaded Moonglows founder Harvey Fuqua to hire Gaye. Gaye joined the Moonglows as first tenor, and the group moved to Detroit in search of a deal with Berry Gordy Jr.

  In 1963, Diddley starred in a UK concert tour alongside the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, with a little-known band called the Rolling Stones as support. He also wrote "Love Is Strange" with guitarist Jody Williams in 1956; Mickey and Sylvia took it to number 11 on the chart in 1957.

• 6. Rectangular Guitars and Lyrical Games

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  The guitar that defined his visual identity was born from an embarrassing gig. In a 2005 interview on JJJ radio in Australia, Diddley described jumping around on stage with a Gibson L5 and landing awkwardly, hurting his groin. He designed a smaller, less-restrictive instrument to keep performing at that kinetic level. The result was the rectangular-bodied "Twang Machine", built by Gretsch and referred to as "cigar-box shaped" by music promoter Dick Clark. He also had a guitar called the "Cadillac" and a rectangular model named the "Turbo 5-speed", with built-in envelope filter, flanger, and delay, custom-made by Tom Holmes, who also built guitars for ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons.

  His lyrical instincts ran toward folk traditions and verbal games. "Bo Diddley" was built on hambone rhymes. The opening line of "Hey Bo Diddley" derived from the nursery rhyme "Old MacDonald". The song "Say Man" drew on the African-American game known as "the dozens": percussionist Jerome Green delivered the line, "You've got the nerve to call somebody ugly. Why, you so ugly that the stork that brought you in the world oughta be arrested." Scholars have cited "Say Man" and "Who Do You Love?" as progenitors of hip-hop, pointing to the rap-style boasting and the use of that dozens tradition.

  Many of his songs, including "Hey Bo Diddley" and "Who Do You Love?", used no chord changes at all. The musicians held the same chord throughout, letting the rhythms generate all the tension. His 1955 debut album, also called Bo Diddley, used the Moonglows as a backing group, and in one well-known 1958 session he added harmonies from the Carnations, recording as the Teardrops, on the songs "I'm Sorry", "Crackin' Up", and "Don't Let it Go".

• 7. Later Life and Legacy

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  From 1971 to 1978, Diddley lived in Los Lunas, New Mexico, where he served for two and a half years as a deputy sheriff in the Valencia County Citizens' Patrol and purchased and donated three highway-patrol pursuit cars. He later moved to Hawthorne, Florida, living on a large estate in a log cabin he helped build. The last thirteen years of his life were spent in Archer, Florida, a small farming town near Gainesville.

  In 1979, he appeared as an opening act for the Clash on their US tour. In 1989, he licensed his image to Nike for the "Bo Knows" campaign alongside dual sportsman Bo Jackson. The agreement ended in 1991, but in 1999 a T-shirt bearing his image and the phrase "You don't know diddley" appeared in a Gainesville sports apparel store. Diddley fought Nike over the copyright in Manhattan Federal Court.

  He had sold the rights to his songs early and received no royalties from his most successful period until 1989. His final studio album, A Man Amongst Men, released in 1996 with guest contributions from Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and The Shirelles, earned a Grammy Award nomination in 1997 for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

  In May 2007, after a stroke suffered following a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Diddley was admitted to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska. The stroke affected the left side of his brain, causing receptive and expressive aphasia. He followed it with a heart attack on the 28th of August, 2007. In November 2007, he returned to his birthplace of McComb for the unveiling of a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail, which described him as "acclaimed as a founder of rock-and-roll." Local musician Jesse Robinson sensed Diddley wanted to sing and handed him a microphone, the only time he performed publicly after the stroke.

  He died on the 2nd of June, 2008. According to family members present at his bedside, a gospel song was sung, and when it ended he opened his eyes, gave a thumbs up, and said, "Wow! I'm goin' to Heaven!" The song was "Walk Around Heaven". In November 2009, the guitar used in his final stage performance sold for sixty thousand dollars at auction.