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'Nobody did it' like Bo Diddley

By Ken Barnes, USA TODAY

The Bo Diddley rhythm is the pulse beat of the universe. Or so it seems sometimes, so primal and basic is that 5/4 "hambone" syncopation introduced on his first, self-named 1955 hit, derived from ancient African rhythms and overlaid with eerie, tremolo guitar.

It's "one of the fundamental building blocks of the new musical vocabulary" of rock 'n' roll, says blues scholar Pete Welding.

He came to recording late, at 26, but like Chuck Berry arrived fully formed, with the double-sided No. 1 R&B hit Bo Diddley/I'm a Man displaying his trademark beat, wit, swagger and penchant for third-person references. (He would later write songs declaring that Bo Diddley was a gunslinger, a lumberjack, a lover and more.)

It was a startling record. As George Thorogood told Rolling Stone: "You listen to Bo Diddley and you sit there and you get numb." Keith Richards, whose Rolling Stones covered a number of Diddley tunes, told the same publication: "Bo was fascinatingly on the edge. There was something African going on there. His style was outrageous."

He was born Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss. His surname was changed to McDaniel after his mother's cousin, who raised him. He moved to Chicago and learned violin before picking up the guitar. His professional name probably derives from the one-stringed Southern instrument called the diddley bow, on which his famed rhythm was often played, though he told several stories about the origin.

Although his success was relatively fleeting after his initial splash — he never surpassed No. 20 on the pop charts and amassed 10 R&B hits in his lifetime — he was enormously influential beyond the omnipresence of the beat that bears his name.

Just three further examples:

•Bo Diddley's a rap progenitor. His biggest pop hit, 1959's Say Man, was even more boggling than Bo Diddley, its lyrics consisting solely of a session of the dozens in which he and maraca player Jerome Green traded insults and brags in a manner that anticipated the spoken-word style and larger-than-life lyrical content of rap.

•Bo Diddley's a guitar wizard. Not only sonically — although the songs that borrow his style number in the hundreds — but as a designer. He played and was photographed with innumerable space-age, custom-designed guitars of all shapes and sizes, inspiring later axe innovators such as ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen.

•Bo Diddley's a feminist. Well, not that you could ever tell from his songs, but he was one of the first blues bandleaders to feature a female musician, when the Duchess (Norma-Jean Wofford) began playing guitar with him in the late '50s.

His only hit after 1962 was 1967's Ooh Baby, and he wandered down some odd musical byways in later years, even recording a bubblegum single (a payback of sorts, since his beat and nursery-rhyme lyrics were a major influence on that deceptively simple pop genre). He opened for The Clash on their first U.S. tour and continued to tour actively before suffering a stroke after a show in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in May 2007.

He once boasted in song that he was "500% more man." As an outsized personality with the musical genius to justify the ego, he certainly was.

Back at the dawn of civilisation, when sexual intercourse had just begun and the big beat was emerging from the primordial slime, no self-respecting bunch of young English rhythm-and-blues hounds could call themselves a proper band if their repertoire didn't boast at least one Bo Diddley song. It might be Mona, or Roadrunner, or Pretty Thing, or You Can't Judge a Book. But as long as there was a song with that Bo Diddley beat, then credibility and respect were automatically conferred.

That famous rhythm is most easily explained through the cadence of a single spoken phrase. Say "shave-and-a-haircut (pause) two bits", and you have the single bar of 4/4 time which, repeated ad infinitum, gives you an approximation of what Diddley was up to.

His songs were learned from the precious pages of the holy writ: hard-to-find 45rpm singles, issued first on the black-and-silver London label, then on yellow-and-red Pye R&B. While your big sister was buying the latest from Ruby Murray or Russ Conway, these were your passport to the new world a-comin'. And, eventually, what you wanted to do was learn how to make this music for yourself.

Hundreds of us, eventually thousands, graduated from skiffle groups - a home-made guitar, a tea-chest bass, a washboard and Rock Island Line - to form groups dedicated to the new ideal represented by Bo Diddley's vinyl outpourings. Much more than even the hip-swivelling teen-hop sounds of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran, they represented a force that would carry us far away from the adult mores of post-war Britain. In the 1960s, I didn't join the Boy Scouts. I joined Bo Diddley.

Mick Jagger shook a pair of maracas, just like Diddley's accomplice, Jerome Green, as he howled Mona (I Need You Baby) with the young Rolling Stones. The Pretty Things, their fellow sharecroppers in the Thames delta, named themselves after another Diddley composition. Up in Newcastle, Eric Burdon and the Animals recorded something they called The Story of Bo Diddley. Teenage guitarists such as Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page heard the screeching hot-rod noises Diddley made with his souped-up axe at the beginning of Roadrunner and experienced a moment of transformation. When the TV show Ready Steady Go! organised a national talent competition for beat groups, it was won by an outfit called the Bo Street Runners.

For a drummer like me, in a band in 1964, the Diddley song was the highlight of any gig. You could abandon the fancy asymmetrical grip on your sticks normally associated with jazz drummers or classical percussionists, turn them around, and use the blunt ends to pile into the tom-toms. Forget the hipster snap of the snare drum, or the sizzle and crash of the cymbals. The raw Diddley beat was a tom-tom thing.

And what happened was that it induced dancers to move in a different way. For three or four minutes, they dropped into a deeper groove, getting in touch with a more fundamental set of instincts. It was the exactly the sort of thing that terrified a generation of parents: the soundtrack to a Dionysian orgy. Each song felt as though it could go on for ever.

In most of Diddley's songs, the chords never changed. The melodies were minimal and the words, although pithy and often pungent, were not the point. He could and did go further than "I'm a roadrunner, honey, and you can't keep up with me", but he never really needed to. What mattered was the beat, and the pioneering sounds of distortion that he wrung from his weird, rectangular-bodied electric guitar.

The songs were like mantras, and their incessant repetition and lack of dynamic variation lent them a kind of hypnotic power that was quite different from the other components of the standard R&B repertoire. Benny Spellman's Fortune Teller, John Lee Hooker's Dimples, Muddy Waters' Hoochie Coochie Man and Little Walter's My Babe were great numbers, coming on a hotline from R&B Central in New Orleans or Chicago. But they had elements of structural variety and decoration that seemed almost prissy. The source of a Diddley song seemed to be somewhere deep within the earth, close to the molten core.

The Diddley beat was a means of summoning thunder, and as such it seemed to hark back further than the recording studios of Chicago, further than the juke joints of the Mississippi delta - all the way back to the west African lands from which slaves had been transported, and to the music they made before their descendants got their hands on trumpets, pianos and electric guitars.

Let's get it absolutely straight: just like Diddley always said, he and Chuck Berry invented rock'n'roll. But while Berry was busy cleaning up his music by incorporating country music's storytelling and a pinch of jazz sophistication into his hugely successful songs, Diddley headed straight back to a primeval heartbeat that gave the music a feral allure that eventually crossed continents and all known frontiers of culture and class.

So, no arguments, the music was invented by black men. But when rock'n'roll came to be reinvented in the Britain of the early 1960s, it was mostly middle-class white boys who did it. Boys such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Pete Townshend, who grew up in homes where Handel, Gilbert & Sullivan, George Formby, Gracie Fields or Victor Silvester provided the soundtrack, but who came out of grammar schools and art colleges, responding to the transgressive power of music that could only be heard, like coded messages from another world, via the crackly signal of Radio Luxembourg, or, for a couple of hours each week, the Light Programme's Saturday Club.

Voices that had previously sung Anglican hymns in boy-soprano tones learned to rough themselves up in imitation of the offspring of Mississippi delta sharecroppers. The humble harmonica became an instrument on which notes could be bent and prolonged in imitation of the sound of a distant train whistle, heard through Georgia pines on a sultry summer night. And those of us with a set of drums learned the thrilling art of syncopation.

Diddley's beat, like his name, almost certainly had its origins in Africa. The name came from the diddley bow, a one-string violin made and played by plantation children. He didn't invent the beat - it was already known to some black musicians as the "hambone" rhythm - but he made it his own, and then made it ours.

There was more to Bo Diddley than that - our band, called the Junco Partners after the title of a song by a Louisiana man, James Wayne - performed a great song of his called Mama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shut, which had a completely different riff, though it kept the same rumbling menace (in the originator's hands, at least). But that basic rhythm - which also powers Bruce Springsteen's joyful She's the One, still a staple of the E Street Band's set - saw him through a 50-year career.

Diddley didn't get what he deserved. Like most black musicians of his era, he recorded for businessmen who believed they could get away with paying their black artists a royalty of no more than 2-3% of the price of the record, and that the precise accounting of those royalties was nobody's business but their own. For years, Diddley didn't have a clue that his records were even being sold outside the US. If he had received a proper royalty - say 12-15% - of every record sold under his name around the world, whether on 78, 45 or 33rpm vinyl disc, tape or compact disc, he would have been able to afford a brand new Cadillac every day of the year.

Those who learned from him were the ones who reaped the rewards. And when they heard of his death this week, every one of them - the ones with mansions, as well as those who let the drum kit go back to the hire-purchase company the day they got a proper job - should have felt a pang of conscience, along with the fathomless gratitude for a gift beyond price.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008