Bo Diddley
Ellas Bates McDaniel, known professionally as Bo Diddley, was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter who played a key role in the transition from the blues to rock and roll. He influenced many artists, including Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, George Thorogood, Syd Barrett, Tom Petty, and the Clash.
His use of African rhythms and a signature beat, a simple five-accent hambone rhythm, is a cornerstone of hip hop, rock, and pop music. In recognition of his achievements, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the Blues Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2017. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Diddley is also recognized for his technical innovations, including his use of tremolo and reverb effects to enhance the sound of his distinctive rectangular guitars.
Early life
Bo Diddley was born in McComb, Mississippi, as Ellas Otha Bates. He was the only child of Ethel Wilson, a sharecropper's teenaged daughter, and Eugene Bates, whom he never knew. Wilson was only sixteen, and being unable to support a family, she gave her cousin, Gussie McDaniel, permission to raise her son. McDaniel eventually adopted him, and he assumed her surname. Diddley denied ever having the name "Otha" in a 2001 interview, saying "My name is not 'Otha'... I don't know where they got that 'Otha' from." The website maintained by his estate states that it was originally part of his birth name.After his adoptive father Robert died in 1934, when Diddley was five years old, Gussie McDaniel moved with him and her three children to the South Side of Chicago; he later dropped Otha from his name and became Ellas McDaniel. He was an active member of Chicago's Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, where he studied the trombone and the violin, becoming so proficient on the violin that the musical director invited him to join the orchestra, in which he played until he was 18. However, he was more interested in the joyful, rhythmic music he heard at a local Pentecostal Church and took up the guitar; his first recordings were based on that frenetic church music. Diddley said he thought that the trance-like rhythm he used in his rhythm and blues music came from the Sanctified churches he had attended as a youth in his Chicago neighborhood.
Career
Inspired by a John Lee Hooker performance, Diddley supplemented his income as a carpenter and mechanic by playing on street corners with friends, including Jerome Green, in the Hipsters band, later renamed the Langley Avenue Jive Cats. Green became a near-constant member of McDaniel's backing band, the two often trading joking insults with each other during live shows. In the summers of 1943 and 1944, he played at the Maxwell Street market in a band with Earl Hooker. By 1951 he was playing on the street with backing from Roosevelt Jackson on washtub bass and Jody Williams, who had played harmonica as a boy but took up guitar in his teens after he met Diddley at a talent show, with Diddley teaching him some aspects of playing the instrument, including how to play the bass line. Williams later played lead guitar on "Who Do You Love?".In 1951, he landed a regular spot at the 708 Club, on Chicago's South Side, with a repertoire influenced by Louis Jordan, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters. In late 1954, he teamed up with harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold, drummer Clifton James and bass player Roosevelt Jackson and recorded demos of "I'm a Man" and "Bo Diddley". They re-recorded the songs at Universal Recording Corp. for Chess Records, with a backing ensemble comprising Otis Spann, Lester Davenport, Frank Kirkland, and Jerome Green. The record was released in March 1955, and the A-side, "Bo Diddley", became a number one R&B hit.
Origins of stage name
The origin of the stage name Bo Diddley is unclear. McDaniel said his peers gave him the name, which he suspected was an insult. Diddly is a truncation of diddly squat, which means "absolutely nothing". Diddley also said that the name first belonged to a singer his adoptive mother knew. Harmonicist Billy Boy Arnold said that it was a local comedian's name, which Leonard Chess adopted as McDaniel's stage name and the title of his first single. McDaniel also stated that his school classmates in Chicago gave him the nickname, which he started using when sparring and boxing in the neighborhood with The Little Neighborhood Golden Gloves Bunch.In the 1921 story "Black Death", by Zora Neale Hurston, Beau Diddely was a womanizer who impregnates a young woman, disavows responsibility, and meets his undoing by the powers of the local hoodoo man. Hurston submitted it in a contest run by the academic journal Opportunity in 1925, where it won an honorable mention, but it was never published during her lifetime.
A diddley bow is a homemade single-string instrument that survived in the American Deep South, especially in Mississippi. Played mainly by children, the diddley bow in its simplest form was made by nailing a length of broom wire to the side of a house, using a rock placed under the string as a movable bridge, and played in the style of a bottleneck guitar, with various objects used as a slider. The apparent consensus among scholars is that the diddley bow is derived from the monochord zithers of central Africa.
Success in the 1950s and 1960s
On November 20, 1955, Diddley appeared on the popular television program The Ed Sullivan Show. According to legend, when someone on the show's staff overheard him casually singing "Sixteen Tons" in the dressing room, he was asked to perform the song on the show. One of Diddley's later versions of the story was that upon seeing "Bo Diddley" on the cue card, he thought he was to perform both his self-titled hit single and "Sixteen Tons". Sullivan was furious and banned Diddley from his show, reputedly saying that he would not last six months. Chess Records included Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" on the 1963 album Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger.Diddley's hit singles continued in the 1950s and 1960s: "Pretty Thing", "Say Man", and "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover". He also released numerous albums, including Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger and Have Guitar, Will Travel. These bolstered his self-invented legend. Between 1958 and 1963, Checker Records released eleven full-length Bo Diddley albums. In the 1960s, he broke through as a crossover artist with white audiences, but he rarely aimed his compositions at teenagers. Diddley was among those musicians who capitalized on the mid-1960s surfing and beach party craze in the United States, and released the albums Surfin' with Bo Diddley and Bo Diddley's Beach Party. These featured heavy, distorted blues, played on his Gretsch guitar with bended notes and minor key riffs, unlike the clean, undistorted sounds of the Fender guitars used by the California surf bands. The cover of Surfin' with Bo Diddley had a photograph of two surfers riding a big wave.
In 1963, Diddley starred in a UK concert tour with the Everly Brothers and Little Richard along with the Rolling Stones.
Diddley wrote many songs for himself and also for others. In 1956, he and guitarist Jody Williams co-wrote the pop song "Love Is Strange", a hit for Mickey & Sylvia in 1957, reaching number 11 on the chart. Mickey Baker claimed that he and Bo Diddley's wife, Ethel Smith, wrote the song. Diddley also wrote "Mama ", which was a minor hit for the pioneering rockabilly singer Jo Ann Campbell, who performed the song in the 1959 rock and roll film Go Johnny Go.
After moving from Chicago to Washington, D.C., Diddley built his first home recording studio in the basement of his home at 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE. Frequented by several of Washington, D.C.'s musical luminaries, the studio was the site where he recorded the Checker LP Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger. Diddley also produced and recorded several up-and-coming groups from the Washington, D.C. area. One of the first groups he recorded was local doo-wop group the Marquees, featuring Marvin Gaye and baritone-bass Chester Simmons, who moonlighted as Diddley's chauffeur.
The Marquees appeared in talent shows at the Lincoln Theatre, and Diddley, impressed by their smooth vocal delivery, let them rehearse in his studio. Diddley got the Marquees signed to Columbia subsidiary label OKeh Records after unsuccessfully attempting to get them a contract with his own label, Chess. The OKeh label rivaled Chess in the promotion of rhythm and blues. On September 25, 1957, Diddley drove the group to New York City to record "Wyatt Earp", a novelty song written by Reese Palmer, lead singer of the Marquees. Diddley produced the session, with the group backed by his own band. They cut their first record, a single with "Wyatt Earp" on the A-side and "Hey Little School Girl" on the B-side, but it failed to become a hit. Diddley persuaded Moonglows founder and backing vocalist Harvey Fuqua to hire Gaye. Gaye joined the Moonglows as first tenor; the group then moved to Detroit with the hope of signing with Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr.
Diddley included women in his band: Norma-Jean Wofford, also known as The Duchess; Gloria Jolivet; Peggy Jones, also known as Lady Bo, a lead guitarist ; and Cornelia Redmond, also known as Cookie V.
Later years
In early 1971, writer-musician Michael Lydon, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, conducted a lengthy, rambling interview of Diddley, at his then home in the San Fernando Valley, California. Lydon described him as a "protean genius" whose songs were "hymns to himself", and led the published piece with a Diddley quote: "Everything I know I taught myself."Over the decades, Diddley's performing venues ranged from intimate clubs to stadiums. On March 25, 1972, he played with the Grateful Dead at the Academy of Music in New York City. The Grateful Dead released part of this concert as Volume 30 of the band's concert album series, Dick's Picks. Also in the early 1970s, the soundtrack of the ground-breaking animated film Fritz the Cat contained his song "Bo Diddley", in which a crow dances and finger-pops to the track.
Diddley spent some years in New Mexico, living in Los Lunas from 1971 to 1978, while continuing his musical career. He served for two and a half years as a deputy sheriff in the Valencia County Citizens' Patrol; during that time he purchased and donated three highway-patrol pursuit cars. In the late 1970s, he left Los Lunas and moved to Hawthorne, Florida, where he lived on a large estate in a custom-made log cabin, which he helped to build. For the remainder of his life he divided his time between Albuquerque and Florida, living the last 13 years of his life 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 1983, he made a cameo appearance as a Philadelphia pawn shop owner in the comedy film Trading Places. He also appeared in George Thorogood's music video for the song "Bad to the Bone," portraying a guitar-slinging pool shark.
In 1985, he appeared on George Thorogood's set, alongside fellow blues legend Albert Collins, on the Live Aid American stage to perform Thorogood's popular cover of Diddley's song Who Do You Love?".
In 1989, Diddley and his management company, Talent Source, entered into a licensing with the sportswear brand, Nike. The Wieden & Kennedy-produced commercial in the "Bo Knows" campaign teamed Diddley with dual sportsman Bo Jackson. The agreement ended in 1991, but in 1999, a T-shirt of Diddley's image and "You don't know diddley" slogan was purchased in a Gainesville, Florida, sports apparel store. Diddley felt that Nike should not continue to use the slogan or his likeness and fought Nike over the copyright infringement. Despite the fact that lawyers for both parties could not come to a renewed legal arrangement, Nike allegedly continued marketing the apparel and ignored cease-and-desist orders, and a lawsuit was filed on Diddley's behalf, in Manhattan Federal Court.
Diddley played a blues and rock musician named Axman in the 1990 comedy film Rockula, directed by Luca Bercovici and starring Dean Cameron.
In Legends of Guitar, Diddley performed with Steve Cropper, B.B. King, Les Paul, Albert Collins, and George Benson, among others. He joined the Rolling Stones on their 1994 concert broadcast of Voodoo Lounge, performing "Who Do You Love?" at Joe Robbie Stadium, in Miami.
In 1996, he released A Man Amongst Men, his first major-label album with guest artists like Keith Richards, Ron Wood and The Shirelles. The album earned a Grammy Award nomination in 1997 for the Best Contemporary Blues Album category.
Diddley performed a number of shows around the country in 2005 and 2006, with fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Johnnie Johnson and his band, consisting of Johnson on keyboards, Richard Hunt on drums and Gus Thornton on bass. In 2006, he participated as the headliner of a grassroots-organized fundraiser concert to benefit the town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The "Florida Keys for Katrina Relief" had originally been set for October 23, 2005, when Hurricane Wilma barreled through the Florida Keys on October 24, causing flooding and economic mayhem.
In January 2006, the Florida Keys had recovered enough to host the fundraising concert to benefit the more hard-hit community of Ocean Springs. When asked about the fundraiser, Diddley stated, "This is the United States of America. We believe in helping one another". The all-star band included members of the Soul Providers, and famed artists Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band, Joey Covington of Jefferson Airplane, Alfonso Carey of The Village People, and Carl Spagnuolo of Jay & The Techniques. In an interview with Holger Petersen, on Saturday Night Blues on CBC Radio in the fall of 2006, he commented on racism in the music industry establishment during his early career. Diddley sold the rights to his songs early on, and until 1989 he received no royalties from the most successful part of his career.
His final guitar performance on a studio album was with the New York Dolls on their 2006 album One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. He contributed guitar work to the song "Seventeen", which was included as a bonus track on the limited-edition version of the disc.
In May 2007, Diddley suffered a stroke after a concert the previous day in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Nonetheless, he delivered an energetic performance to an enthusiastic crowd. A few months later he had a heart attack. While recovering, Diddley came back to his hometown of McComb, Mississippi, in early November 2007, for the unveiling of a plaque devoted to him on the Mississippi Blues Trail. This marked his achievements and noted that he was "acclaimed as a founder of rock-and-roll." He was not supposed to perform, but as he listened to the music of local musician Jesse Robinson, who sang a song written for this occasion, Robinson sensed that Diddley wanted to perform and handed him a microphone, the only time that he performed publicly after his stroke.