Saturday, June 01, 2002 10:20:00 AM
Rock 'n' Roll Artists A-Z...Bo Diddley
http://members.tripod.com/~Originator_2/index.html
http://www.tsimon.com/diddley.htm
You can't judge an apple by lookin' at the tree
You can't judge honey by lookin' at the bee
You can't judge a daughter by lookin' at the mother
You can't judge a book by lookin' at the cover
Oh, can't you see -- whoa, you've misjudged me
I look like a farmer but I'm a lover
You can't judge a book by lookin' at the cover...Bo Diddley
Bo Diddley had most of his success in the music business on the R&B charts in the 50's and early 60's. He had a very strong influence on others who followed.
His name at his birth in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi was Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel; he had been adopted by his mother's cousin, Gussie McDaniel, and a man named Bates. He had 3 half-brothers and a half-sister. He taught himself how to play a guitar and played it in a band he joined while in school. He also played the trombone in his church choir. Ellas began a five-year stint as the leader of a three-man washboard band when he was seventeen. In the mid-1930's the family moved to the south side of Chicago when young Ellas was five years old. Soon after, he began to take violin lessons from Professor O.W. Frederick at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. He studied the violin for twelve years, composing 2 concertos for the instrument
He started to record for the Checker and Chess labels in 1955, an association that lasted for 21 years. Most of his hit songs were on the R&B charts: Diddley Daddy, his two-sided hit Bo Diddley/I'm A Man, You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover, Say Man, and Road Runner. His only song to crossover into the pop charts and make the top forty there was Say Man in 1959, a number twenty entry. His popularity as an R&B performer continued strongly until 1962, after which some of his record sales slacked off until he came back with Ooh Baby in 1967.
Some of his best work can be found in his more obscure songs from albums that he made in the 50's. Some of these albums had titles such as Bo Diddley and Go Bo Diddley. Included in this group are such songs as Who Do You Love?, Bring It To Jerome, and Diddey Wah Diddey.
In addition to singing and performing, he also did some songwriting. His hambone beat [shave-and-a-hair-cut, six bits] was his trademark, and was often copied by others in their music. Although he had few hit songs in the pop vein, his powerful delivery, somewhat intimidating songs, and the pounding rhythm of his guitar caused him to be a performer in demand. He toured with Dick Clark's road shows, and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Bo Diddley took his name from a one-stringed African guitar, and usually played a guitar with a rectangular box shape. He managed to work his name into some of his songs. He is still singing and performing, and took his place in the Rock-and-Roll Hall Of Fame in 1987.
Ever heard "I Want Candy" or "Not Fade Away" or "Willie & The Hand Jive", Shirley & Company's "Shame, Shame, Shame" or U2's "Desire" or George Michael's "Faith"? If you have, then you've heard the "Bo Diddley beat"; the most famous beat in the world! One of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll, Bo Diddley's innovative pounding and hypnotic, Latin-tinged beat, his vast array of electric custom-built guitars, his use of reverb, tremelo and distortion to make his guitars talk, mumble and roar, his use of female musicians, his wild stage shows, and his on-record and on-stage rapping, pre-date all others.
For Christmas in 1940, his sister Lucille bought him his first guitar, a cheap Harmony acoustic. It was at this time that he acquired the nickname "Bo Diddley" ("...Bo Diddley is me; to tell ya the truth, I don't know what it (the name) really is...") from his fellow pupils at the Foster Vocational High School in Chicago.
The newly-named Bo Diddley had long been fascinated by the rhythms that he heard coming from the sanctified churches. A frustrated drummer, he tried to translate the sounds that he heard into his own style. Gradually he began to duplicate what he did with his violin bow by rapidly flicking his pick across his guitar strings. "I play the guitar as if I'm playing the drums....I play drum licks on the guitar." He continued to practice the guitar through his early teens.
Shortly before leaving school he formed his first group, a trio named The Hipsters, later known as The Langley Avenue Jive Cats, after the Chicago street where he lived. Upon graduation he pursued a variety of low paid occupations including truck driving, building site work and boxing, playing locally with his group to supplement his income. Around this time he married his first wife Louise Woolingham, but the marriage did not survive. A year later he married Ethel "Tootsie" Smith, a marriage that lasted just over a decade. In 1950 maracas player Jerome Green joined the group, followed a year later by harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold.
After more than a decade of playing on street corners and in clubs around Chicago, Bo Diddley finally got the chance to cut a demo of 2 songs that he had written; "Uncle John" and "I'm A Man". After various rejections from local record labels, (most notably Vee-Jay), in the spring of 1955 he took the recordings to brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, owners of Chess Records, with studios located at 4750-2 South Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago. They suggested that he changed the title and the lyrics of "Uncle John" to more reflect his own unique personality.
The 2 songs were re-recorded at Bill Putnam's Universal Recording Studio at 111 East Ontario in Chicago on Wednesday March 2nd 1955, and released as a double A-side disc "Bo Diddley"/"I'm A Man" on the Chess Records subsidiary label Checker Records. It went straight to the top of the rhythm 'n' blues charts, establishing Bo Diddley as one of the most exciting and original new talents in American music.
With musical influences of his own ranging from Louis Jordan to John Lee Hooker, and from Nat "King" Cole to Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley was now set to help shape and define the sound and presentation of rock music for all time. From Elvis Presley to George Thorogood, from The Rolling Stones to ZZ Top, from The Doors to The Clash, from Buddy Holly to Prince, and from The Everly Brothers to Run DMC, all acknowledged the unique influences of Bo Diddley upon their styles of music.
Now in his early 70s, he is still very much active in the recording studio and in the clubs and the concert halls around the world. He performed a rousing version of his classic song "Who Do You Love" with George Thorogood & The Destroyers in front of a TV audience of millions at the Live Aid Concert in Philadelphia in 1985. A couple of years later he was deservedly an early inductee into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. In 1996 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm 'n' Blues Foundation and in 1998 received another Lifetime Achievement Award this time from The Recording Academy at that year's annual Grammy Awards Ceremony. In 2000 yet further honors were justifiably awarded to him when he was inducted into The Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame and into The North Florida Music Association Hall of Fame.
In the words of one of his many famous eponymous songs, "Bo Diddley Put The Rock in Rock 'n' Roll", and remember..... Bo Knows!
Recommended Listening:
"Bo Diddley - His Best" (MCA/Chess) Released in 1997 as part of the Chess 50th Anniversary Collection, this 20 track CD includes nearly all his classic songs.
Worth Seeking Out:
"Bo Diddley - The Chess Years" (Charly) 12 CD box set released in 1993, and the largest collection of Bo Diddley recordings ever compiled.
More on Bo Diddley
©1999 Nando Media - by RON WORD - JACKSONVILLE, FL. - posted September 16, 1999
Bo Diddley's greatest claim to fame may not be his induction into the Rock and Roll of Fame, nor his lifetime achievement award from the Grammys. Not even the famous song that bears his name or that beat that drove his music - and the music of so many others after him.
Already a rock and blues icon, Diddley entered the American consciousness after a 1989 "Bo Knows" commercial for Nike. Commenting on football and baseball star Bo Jackson's guitar skills, Bo Diddley turned to the camera and said, "He don't know Diddley."
"I never could figure out what it had to do with shoes, but it worked," Diddley says. "I got into a lot of new front rooms on the tube. I thank Nike and Bo Jackson for doing it."
But this 70-year-old rocker, famous for his innovative use of rhythm, his square homemade guitar, dark glasses and black hat, has not reaped the financial rewards to go along with his music awards.
While Diddley appreciates the honors, "it didn't put no figures in my checkbook," he says angrily.
The need for money and not just a love of music keeps him constantly on the road, playing county fairs, small casinos, private parties and music halls.
"If you ain't got no money, ain't nobody calls you honey," he says.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 1987, followed by the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1989. He received his lifetime achievement award from the Grammys in 1998.
"It just told people they thought enough of Bo Diddley for me to be honored by putting my name on something, which as really great. But it didn't put no bucks in my kitty."
Diddley says he only received a small portion of the money he should have made during his career. Like other artists of his generation, he was paid a flat fee for his recordings and received no royalty payments on record sales. He also says he was never paid for many of his performances.
"I am owed. I've never got paid," he says. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."
In 1994, he claimed to be $300,000 in debt and was paying for a large home in Hawthorne, about 20 miles outside Gainesville. He later divorced and moved to a secluded area outside Bronson, about 40 miles to the west. "My kids were deprived of going to college," he says. "The money I was making wasn't enough to send them somewhere."
Touring at his age doesn't trouble him.
"Seventy ain't nothing but a damn number," he says. "I'm writing and creating new stuff and putting together new different things. Trying to stay out there and roll with the punches. I ain't quit yet."
The name Bo Diddley came from other youngsters. "I don't know where the kids got it, but the kids in grammar school gave me that name," he says. He liked it and made it his stage name. Some claim he got the stage name Bo Diddley from a one-stringed African guitar, the diddley bow. In fact, this is probably the least likely of the derivations. (BO DIDDLEY himself claims only to have heard of this theory in recent years). The truth is that he does not know why he gained this nickname, only that it was often used in the south of the USA to describe a mischievous boy, or a scallywag (Bojangles is a similar term)
"Diddley - that word has been around for a long, long time. When I was a kid, my mother used to say, `You don't know diddley squat."'
Diddley was playing Chicago's Maxwell Street, a legendary location for street performances, in his early teens. He was signed to the Chess and Checkers record labels in 1955, home to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, among others. His first single, "Bo Diddley," went to No. 2 on the rhythm and blues charts.
"His Chess recordings stand among the best singular recordings of the 20th century," said Howard Kramer, assistant curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Diddley said he had no musical influences growing up. "I don't like to copy anybody. Everybody tries to do what I do, update it. I don't have any idols I copied after."
But many artists, including the Rolling Stones, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Holly, and Elvis Costello, copied Diddley's style. His so-called Bo Diddley beat was a progenitor of the sound that became heavy metal, and his boasting style was a precursor of rap.
"They copied everything I did, upgraded it, messed it up. It seems to me that nobody can come up with their own thing, they have to put a little bit of Bo Diddley there," he says.
Diddley was a pioneer of the electric guitar, adding reverb and tremolo. "He treats it like it was a drum, very rhythmic," said E. Michael Harrington, music theory and composition professor at Belmont University in Nashville.
But despite his technique and talent, Diddley said disc jockeys in the early 1950s called his work "jungle music." It wasn't until the pioneering disc jockey Alan Freed came up with the term "rock and roll" that Diddley's music found a home on mainstream radio.
Diddley said Freed was talking about him, recalling Freed's introduction before an Apollo
Theater concert: "Here is a man with an original sound, who is going to rock and roll you right out of your seat."
Diddley's major hits included "Say Man," "You Can't Judge a Book By It's Cover," "I'm A Man," "Shave and a Haircut," "Uncle John" and "The Mule."
"I came out of school and made something out of myself," he said. "I am known all over the globe, all over the world. There are guys who have done a lot of things that don't have the same impact that I had."
He only had a few hits in the 1950s and early '60s, but as Bo Diddley sang, "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover." You can't judge an artist by his chart success, either, and Diddley produced greater and more influential music than all but a handful of the best early rockers. The Bo Diddley beat is one of rock & roll's bedrock rhythms, showing up in the work of Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, and even pop-garage knockoffs like the Strangeloves' 1965 hit "I Want Candy." Diddley's hypnotic rhythmic attack and declamatory, boasting vocals stretched back as far as Africa for their roots, and looked as far into the future as rap. His trademark otherwordly vibrating, fuzzy guitar style did much to expand the instrument's power and range. But even more important, Bo's bounce was fun and irresistibly rocking, with a wisecracking, jiving tone that epitomized rock & roll at its most humorously outlandish and freewheeling...
His very first single, "Bo Diddley"/"I'm a Man" (1955), was a double-sided monster. The A-side was soaked with futuristic waves of tremolo guitar, set to an ageless nursery rhyme; the flip was a bump-and-grind, harmonica-driven shuffle, based around a devastating blues riff. But the result was not exactly blues, or even straight R&B, but a new kind of guitar-based rock & roll, soaked in the blues and R&B, but owing allegiance to neither.
from All-Music Guide review by Richie Unterberger
Chess Records was, and still is, the ultimate treasurehouse of Chicago blues, not to mention liberal sprinklings of early rock'n'roll, classic R&B, and sixties/seventies soul. Although the company ceased to be active in the mid-seventies, its catalogue lives on, and celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. source
As a live performer, Diddley was galvanizing, using his trademark square guitars and distorted amplification to produce new sounds that anticipated the innovations of '60s guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. In Great Britain, he was revered as a giant on the order of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The Rolling Stones in particular borrowed a lot from Bo's rhythms and attitude in their early days, although they only officially covered a couple of his tunes, "Mona" and "I'm Alright." Other British R&B groups like the Yardbirds, Animals, and Pretty Things also covered Diddley standards in their early days. Buddy Holly covered "Bo Diddley" and used a modified Bo Diddley beat on "Not Fade Away"; when the Stones gave the song the full-on Bo treatment (complete with shaking maracas), the result was their first big British hit.
Bo Diddley - The Originator: A Celebration of his unique contribution to Popular Music. The musician the world knows as BO DIDDLEY has, over the past five decades, indelibly stamped his mark on rhythm 'n' blues, rock 'n' roll and popular music. His innovative trademark rhythm, his electric custom-built guitars, his use of female musicians, his psychedelic guitar sounds, his wild stage shows, and his on-record and on-stage rapping, pre-date all others. His influence on other musicians, both black and white, is immeasurable. Yet he remains probably the least known and the least celebrated of all the major early contributors to rock 'n' roll.
Bo Diddley CD's
'87 - Bo Diddley/Go Bo Diddley
'95 - Bo Knows Bo
'93 - Bo's Blues
'90 - Chess Box
'97 - His Best
'86 - His Greatest Hits
Live
'96 - Man Amongst Men
'85 - Mighty Bo Diddley
Mona
'94 - Promises
'92 - This Should Not Be
]
Breaking Clay Makes My Day!
http://members.tripod.com/~Originator_2/index.html
http://www.tsimon.com/diddley.htm
You can't judge an apple by lookin' at the tree
You can't judge honey by lookin' at the bee
You can't judge a daughter by lookin' at the mother
You can't judge a book by lookin' at the cover
Oh, can't you see -- whoa, you've misjudged me
I look like a farmer but I'm a lover
You can't judge a book by lookin' at the cover...Bo Diddley
Bo Diddley had most of his success in the music business on the R&B charts in the 50's and early 60's. He had a very strong influence on others who followed.
His name at his birth in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi was Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel; he had been adopted by his mother's cousin, Gussie McDaniel, and a man named Bates. He had 3 half-brothers and a half-sister. He taught himself how to play a guitar and played it in a band he joined while in school. He also played the trombone in his church choir. Ellas began a five-year stint as the leader of a three-man washboard band when he was seventeen. In the mid-1930's the family moved to the south side of Chicago when young Ellas was five years old. Soon after, he began to take violin lessons from Professor O.W. Frederick at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church. He studied the violin for twelve years, composing 2 concertos for the instrument
He started to record for the Checker and Chess labels in 1955, an association that lasted for 21 years. Most of his hit songs were on the R&B charts: Diddley Daddy, his two-sided hit Bo Diddley/I'm A Man, You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover, Say Man, and Road Runner. His only song to crossover into the pop charts and make the top forty there was Say Man in 1959, a number twenty entry. His popularity as an R&B performer continued strongly until 1962, after which some of his record sales slacked off until he came back with Ooh Baby in 1967.
Some of his best work can be found in his more obscure songs from albums that he made in the 50's. Some of these albums had titles such as Bo Diddley and Go Bo Diddley. Included in this group are such songs as Who Do You Love?, Bring It To Jerome, and Diddey Wah Diddey.
In addition to singing and performing, he also did some songwriting. His hambone beat [shave-and-a-hair-cut, six bits] was his trademark, and was often copied by others in their music. Although he had few hit songs in the pop vein, his powerful delivery, somewhat intimidating songs, and the pounding rhythm of his guitar caused him to be a performer in demand. He toured with Dick Clark's road shows, and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Bo Diddley took his name from a one-stringed African guitar, and usually played a guitar with a rectangular box shape. He managed to work his name into some of his songs. He is still singing and performing, and took his place in the Rock-and-Roll Hall Of Fame in 1987.
Ever heard "I Want Candy" or "Not Fade Away" or "Willie & The Hand Jive", Shirley & Company's "Shame, Shame, Shame" or U2's "Desire" or George Michael's "Faith"? If you have, then you've heard the "Bo Diddley beat"; the most famous beat in the world! One of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll, Bo Diddley's innovative pounding and hypnotic, Latin-tinged beat, his vast array of electric custom-built guitars, his use of reverb, tremelo and distortion to make his guitars talk, mumble and roar, his use of female musicians, his wild stage shows, and his on-record and on-stage rapping, pre-date all others.
For Christmas in 1940, his sister Lucille bought him his first guitar, a cheap Harmony acoustic. It was at this time that he acquired the nickname "Bo Diddley" ("...Bo Diddley is me; to tell ya the truth, I don't know what it (the name) really is...") from his fellow pupils at the Foster Vocational High School in Chicago.
The newly-named Bo Diddley had long been fascinated by the rhythms that he heard coming from the sanctified churches. A frustrated drummer, he tried to translate the sounds that he heard into his own style. Gradually he began to duplicate what he did with his violin bow by rapidly flicking his pick across his guitar strings. "I play the guitar as if I'm playing the drums....I play drum licks on the guitar." He continued to practice the guitar through his early teens.
Shortly before leaving school he formed his first group, a trio named The Hipsters, later known as The Langley Avenue Jive Cats, after the Chicago street where he lived. Upon graduation he pursued a variety of low paid occupations including truck driving, building site work and boxing, playing locally with his group to supplement his income. Around this time he married his first wife Louise Woolingham, but the marriage did not survive. A year later he married Ethel "Tootsie" Smith, a marriage that lasted just over a decade. In 1950 maracas player Jerome Green joined the group, followed a year later by harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold.
After more than a decade of playing on street corners and in clubs around Chicago, Bo Diddley finally got the chance to cut a demo of 2 songs that he had written; "Uncle John" and "I'm A Man". After various rejections from local record labels, (most notably Vee-Jay), in the spring of 1955 he took the recordings to brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, owners of Chess Records, with studios located at 4750-2 South Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago. They suggested that he changed the title and the lyrics of "Uncle John" to more reflect his own unique personality.
The 2 songs were re-recorded at Bill Putnam's Universal Recording Studio at 111 East Ontario in Chicago on Wednesday March 2nd 1955, and released as a double A-side disc "Bo Diddley"/"I'm A Man" on the Chess Records subsidiary label Checker Records. It went straight to the top of the rhythm 'n' blues charts, establishing Bo Diddley as one of the most exciting and original new talents in American music.
With musical influences of his own ranging from Louis Jordan to John Lee Hooker, and from Nat "King" Cole to Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley was now set to help shape and define the sound and presentation of rock music for all time. From Elvis Presley to George Thorogood, from The Rolling Stones to ZZ Top, from The Doors to The Clash, from Buddy Holly to Prince, and from The Everly Brothers to Run DMC, all acknowledged the unique influences of Bo Diddley upon their styles of music.
Now in his early 70s, he is still very much active in the recording studio and in the clubs and the concert halls around the world. He performed a rousing version of his classic song "Who Do You Love" with George Thorogood & The Destroyers in front of a TV audience of millions at the Live Aid Concert in Philadelphia in 1985. A couple of years later he was deservedly an early inductee into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. In 1996 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm 'n' Blues Foundation and in 1998 received another Lifetime Achievement Award this time from The Recording Academy at that year's annual Grammy Awards Ceremony. In 2000 yet further honors were justifiably awarded to him when he was inducted into The Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame and into The North Florida Music Association Hall of Fame.
In the words of one of his many famous eponymous songs, "Bo Diddley Put The Rock in Rock 'n' Roll", and remember..... Bo Knows!
Recommended Listening:
"Bo Diddley - His Best" (MCA/Chess) Released in 1997 as part of the Chess 50th Anniversary Collection, this 20 track CD includes nearly all his classic songs.
Worth Seeking Out:
"Bo Diddley - The Chess Years" (Charly) 12 CD box set released in 1993, and the largest collection of Bo Diddley recordings ever compiled.
More on Bo Diddley
©1999 Nando Media - by RON WORD - JACKSONVILLE, FL. - posted September 16, 1999
Bo Diddley's greatest claim to fame may not be his induction into the Rock and Roll of Fame, nor his lifetime achievement award from the Grammys. Not even the famous song that bears his name or that beat that drove his music - and the music of so many others after him.
Already a rock and blues icon, Diddley entered the American consciousness after a 1989 "Bo Knows" commercial for Nike. Commenting on football and baseball star Bo Jackson's guitar skills, Bo Diddley turned to the camera and said, "He don't know Diddley."
"I never could figure out what it had to do with shoes, but it worked," Diddley says. "I got into a lot of new front rooms on the tube. I thank Nike and Bo Jackson for doing it."
But this 70-year-old rocker, famous for his innovative use of rhythm, his square homemade guitar, dark glasses and black hat, has not reaped the financial rewards to go along with his music awards.
While Diddley appreciates the honors, "it didn't put no figures in my checkbook," he says angrily.
The need for money and not just a love of music keeps him constantly on the road, playing county fairs, small casinos, private parties and music halls.
"If you ain't got no money, ain't nobody calls you honey," he says.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 1987, followed by the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1989. He received his lifetime achievement award from the Grammys in 1998.
"It just told people they thought enough of Bo Diddley for me to be honored by putting my name on something, which as really great. But it didn't put no bucks in my kitty."
Diddley says he only received a small portion of the money he should have made during his career. Like other artists of his generation, he was paid a flat fee for his recordings and received no royalty payments on record sales. He also says he was never paid for many of his performances.
"I am owed. I've never got paid," he says. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."
In 1994, he claimed to be $300,000 in debt and was paying for a large home in Hawthorne, about 20 miles outside Gainesville. He later divorced and moved to a secluded area outside Bronson, about 40 miles to the west. "My kids were deprived of going to college," he says. "The money I was making wasn't enough to send them somewhere."
Touring at his age doesn't trouble him.
"Seventy ain't nothing but a damn number," he says. "I'm writing and creating new stuff and putting together new different things. Trying to stay out there and roll with the punches. I ain't quit yet."
The name Bo Diddley came from other youngsters. "I don't know where the kids got it, but the kids in grammar school gave me that name," he says. He liked it and made it his stage name. Some claim he got the stage name Bo Diddley from a one-stringed African guitar, the diddley bow. In fact, this is probably the least likely of the derivations. (BO DIDDLEY himself claims only to have heard of this theory in recent years). The truth is that he does not know why he gained this nickname, only that it was often used in the south of the USA to describe a mischievous boy, or a scallywag (Bojangles is a similar term)
"Diddley - that word has been around for a long, long time. When I was a kid, my mother used to say, `You don't know diddley squat."'
Diddley was playing Chicago's Maxwell Street, a legendary location for street performances, in his early teens. He was signed to the Chess and Checkers record labels in 1955, home to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, among others. His first single, "Bo Diddley," went to No. 2 on the rhythm and blues charts.
"His Chess recordings stand among the best singular recordings of the 20th century," said Howard Kramer, assistant curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Diddley said he had no musical influences growing up. "I don't like to copy anybody. Everybody tries to do what I do, update it. I don't have any idols I copied after."
But many artists, including the Rolling Stones, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Holly, and Elvis Costello, copied Diddley's style. His so-called Bo Diddley beat was a progenitor of the sound that became heavy metal, and his boasting style was a precursor of rap.
"They copied everything I did, upgraded it, messed it up. It seems to me that nobody can come up with their own thing, they have to put a little bit of Bo Diddley there," he says.
Diddley was a pioneer of the electric guitar, adding reverb and tremolo. "He treats it like it was a drum, very rhythmic," said E. Michael Harrington, music theory and composition professor at Belmont University in Nashville.
But despite his technique and talent, Diddley said disc jockeys in the early 1950s called his work "jungle music." It wasn't until the pioneering disc jockey Alan Freed came up with the term "rock and roll" that Diddley's music found a home on mainstream radio.
Diddley said Freed was talking about him, recalling Freed's introduction before an Apollo
Theater concert: "Here is a man with an original sound, who is going to rock and roll you right out of your seat."
Diddley's major hits included "Say Man," "You Can't Judge a Book By It's Cover," "I'm A Man," "Shave and a Haircut," "Uncle John" and "The Mule."
"I came out of school and made something out of myself," he said. "I am known all over the globe, all over the world. There are guys who have done a lot of things that don't have the same impact that I had."
He only had a few hits in the 1950s and early '60s, but as Bo Diddley sang, "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover." You can't judge an artist by his chart success, either, and Diddley produced greater and more influential music than all but a handful of the best early rockers. The Bo Diddley beat is one of rock & roll's bedrock rhythms, showing up in the work of Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, and even pop-garage knockoffs like the Strangeloves' 1965 hit "I Want Candy." Diddley's hypnotic rhythmic attack and declamatory, boasting vocals stretched back as far as Africa for their roots, and looked as far into the future as rap. His trademark otherwordly vibrating, fuzzy guitar style did much to expand the instrument's power and range. But even more important, Bo's bounce was fun and irresistibly rocking, with a wisecracking, jiving tone that epitomized rock & roll at its most humorously outlandish and freewheeling...
His very first single, "Bo Diddley"/"I'm a Man" (1955), was a double-sided monster. The A-side was soaked with futuristic waves of tremolo guitar, set to an ageless nursery rhyme; the flip was a bump-and-grind, harmonica-driven shuffle, based around a devastating blues riff. But the result was not exactly blues, or even straight R&B, but a new kind of guitar-based rock & roll, soaked in the blues and R&B, but owing allegiance to neither.
from All-Music Guide review by Richie Unterberger
Chess Records was, and still is, the ultimate treasurehouse of Chicago blues, not to mention liberal sprinklings of early rock'n'roll, classic R&B, and sixties/seventies soul. Although the company ceased to be active in the mid-seventies, its catalogue lives on, and celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. source
As a live performer, Diddley was galvanizing, using his trademark square guitars and distorted amplification to produce new sounds that anticipated the innovations of '60s guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. In Great Britain, he was revered as a giant on the order of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The Rolling Stones in particular borrowed a lot from Bo's rhythms and attitude in their early days, although they only officially covered a couple of his tunes, "Mona" and "I'm Alright." Other British R&B groups like the Yardbirds, Animals, and Pretty Things also covered Diddley standards in their early days. Buddy Holly covered "Bo Diddley" and used a modified Bo Diddley beat on "Not Fade Away"; when the Stones gave the song the full-on Bo treatment (complete with shaking maracas), the result was their first big British hit.
Bo Diddley - The Originator: A Celebration of his unique contribution to Popular Music. The musician the world knows as BO DIDDLEY has, over the past five decades, indelibly stamped his mark on rhythm 'n' blues, rock 'n' roll and popular music. His innovative trademark rhythm, his electric custom-built guitars, his use of female musicians, his psychedelic guitar sounds, his wild stage shows, and his on-record and on-stage rapping, pre-date all others. His influence on other musicians, both black and white, is immeasurable. Yet he remains probably the least known and the least celebrated of all the major early contributors to rock 'n' roll.
Bo Diddley CD's
'87 - Bo Diddley/Go Bo Diddley
'95 - Bo Knows Bo
'93 - Bo's Blues
'90 - Chess Box
'97 - His Best
'86 - His Greatest Hits
Live
'96 - Man Amongst Men
'85 - Mighty Bo Diddley
Mona
'94 - Promises
'92 - This Should Not Be
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