Remembering Bo Diddley: 1928-2008
For a young black singer and guitarist from Chicago with only a minor hit, getting booked on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955 was a career-making opportunity. Sullivan asked him to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s country smash “Sixteen Tons”; instead, the young star unleashed the guitar maelstrom that introduced him to the world, and whose title bore his name: “Bo Diddley.”
The audience went wild, and Sullivan fumed, promising that Diddley would never appear on television again. Later, Diddley recalled the aftermath: “He says to me, ‘You’re the first colored boy ever double-crossed me on a song.’ And I started to hit the dude, because I was a young hoodlum out of Chicago, and I thought ‘colored boy’ was an insult.”
100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Bo Diddley
Diddley was pure masculinity, with songs that shouted his name and proclaimed his skills. With a cigar-box-shape guitar he designed himself, a Stetson on his head and a sound that permanently reoriented the world’s sense of rhythm, Bo Diddley called himself “the Originator.” And when he died at age 79 on June 2nd from heart failure at his home in Archer, Florida, music lost a one-of-a-kind pioneer. “He was by far the most underrated of any Fifties star,” says Phil Spector. “The rhythmic invention, the excellence of the writing, the power of the vocals — nobody else ever did it better.”
Diddley had only one Top 40 pop hit, 1959’s “Say Man,” but the impact of his songwriting, his guitar-playing and that signature “Bo Diddley beat” were as significant as anyone’s contributions in the history of rock & roll. The “one-two-three, one-two” beat — first established on his debut, 1955’s Number One R&B hit “Bo Diddley” — propelled classic songs by Bruce Springsteen (“She’s the One”), U2 (“Desire”), George Michael (“Faith”), the Who (“Magic Bus”) and countless others. “It was like I did the ‘Bo Diddley’ song by accident,” Diddley said. “I just started beating and banging on my guitar. And then I fooled around and got it syncopated right, where it fit the dirty lyrics that I had. And then it just seemed to fall right into place.” If Diddley’s lone contribution to rock & roll had been the Bo Diddley beat, he would already be an immortal. But his legacy is much larger than that. He made records that were built on boasting rhymes decades before LL Cool J or Run-DMC. And he reduced his music to its basic rhythmic core, stripping his sound to the pure primacy of the beat, long before James Brown used a similar approach to transform soul into funk. In Rock & Roll: An Unruly History, Robert Palmer wrote that “what Bo came up with was a comprehensive theory of rhythmic orchestration . . . . The tendency is for every instrument to become a rhythm instrument.”
Friends, Admirers Honor Bo Diddley at Funeral in Gainesville
“I never heard a rhythm come out of a guitar like that,” says Robbie Robertson, whose breakthrough moment was a slashing solo he played on Ronnie Hawkins’ 1963 cover of “Who Do You Love.” “I first met him when I was 16, and he both fascinated me and scared me at the same time.”
Bo Diddley was born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, on December 30th, 1928. He never knew his father, and his mother couldn’t afford to raise him, so he was adopted by her cousin Gussie McDaniel. He took on her family’s name, becoming Ellas McDaniel. “My people are from New Orleans, the bayou country — French, African, Indian, all mixed up,” Diddley said. “That’s where my music comes from, all that mixture.” After Gussie’s husband died, she moved her two daughters, her son and Ellas, then around seven, to Chicago. He began taking violin lessons at church. “I used to read all this funny music, like Tchaikovsky,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “But then I didn’t see too many black dudes playin’ no violin.”
100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Bo Diddley
He picked up the guitar after being astonished by John Lee Hooker. At some point, McDaniel also picked up his unforgettable nickname — though, like much in the Bo Diddley story, its origins are tangled. It has alternately been credited to a street diss meaning “worthless” (as in, “Man, you ain’t bo diddley”); a name he was given during his days as a Golden Gloves boxer; the invention of his harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold; and as a derivation of the “diddley bow,” a single-string guitar seen on Southern farms.
Remembering Bo Diddley: 1928-2008, Page 1 of 2