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Year: Views Playlists: 1. Bo Diddley Ellas Otha Bates December 30, — June 2, , known by his stage name Bo Diddley, was an American rhythm and blues vocalist, guitarist, songwriter usually as Ellas McDaniel , and rock and roll pioneer.
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Know any other songs by Bo Diddley? Don't keep it to yourself! Add it Here. Watch the song video Who Do You Love. The way he chunked on the lower strings was a primary model for what was later known as rhythm guitar. He had lots of space to fill up with his guitar, because his records had no piano and no bass. Which also meant no harmonic complications. Hanging on a single tone, never changing chords—the writer Robert Palmer called that the "deep blues," something that reached from Chicago back to the front-porch style of Missis- sippi and Louisiana.
Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters recorded one-chord songs before Bo Diddley did, but he made them central to his repertoire. Both sides of Bo Diddley's first single were one-chord tunes. The very name Bo Diddley implies a single chord, though he disclaimed having known the term "diddley bow" when he began using his stage name.
The diddley bow, a single strand of wire nailed at both ends to a board, was a fundamental African musical instrument of the down-home American South. Bo Diddley played guitar as if it was a diddley bow with frets, barring up and down with his index finger—he did not play with a bottleneck—while chopping the rhythm with his right hand. He was a key figure in the invention of psychedelic guitar.
He found new ways to mess with the sound, making rhythm out of everything the pickups could detect. At first he couldn't afford an electric guitar; he used spare parts to electrify his acoustic one. He built his own tremolo device, creating a complex sound pattern when he played rhythm chords through it. The now-classic, much-abused Pete Townshend string scrape—running the edge of the guitar pick down the length of the wrapped wire of the low E string—was lifted from Bo Diddley's proto-garage classic "Road Runner.
The first instrument Bo Diddley played as a child was the violin—along with the banjo, a common African-American instrument in the 19th and early 20th centuries—and he may have been the first person to play a blues violin solo in a rock 'n' roll context. With echo, of course. Bo Diddley was an inspired poet with a consistent voice. His lyrics sounded spontaneous and tossed off, but they were coherent. Whatever the improvised circumstances of a song's creation, it resonated with all kinds of meanings, evoking a mysterious reality lurking beneath daily life that reached back to Africa via Mississippi.
If Bo Diddley was comical, he was a jester who'd seen something horrifying. In the first four lines of "Who Do You Love" think of it as "Hoodoo You Love" he walks 47 miles of barbed wire, uses a cobra for a necktie and lives in a house made of rattlesnake hide. But Bo Diddley ditched the bird and went straight to the ring, creating one of the iconic verses of rock 'n' roll:.
Bo Diddley buy baby diamond ring, If that diamond ring don't shine, He gonna take it to a private eye. By the third verse, he was singing about a hoodoo spell: Mojo come to my house, a black cat bone. Bo Diddley had been the name of an old vaudeville comedian who was still kicking around on the chitlin circuit when Ellas McDaniel recorded "Bo Diddley.
It was an on-the-spot decision, he said, and it was the producer and label owner Leonard Chess who put out the record "Bo Diddley" using Bo Diddley as the artist's name. It was positively modernist: a song called "Bo Diddley" about the exploits of a character named Bo Diddley, by an artist named Bo Diddley, who played the Bo Diddley beat. No other first-generation rock 'n' roller started out by taking on a mystical persona and then singing about his adventures in the third person.
By name-checking himself throughout the lyrics of his debut record, Bo Diddley established what we would now call his brand. Today this approach to marketing is routine for rappers, but Bo Diddley was there 30 years before. He was practically rapping anyway, with stream-of-consciousness rhyming over a rhythm loop. At a time when black men were not allowed overt expressions of sexuality in mainstream popular music, Bo Diddley, like his Chicago colleagues, was unequivocally masculine.
But that did not make him antifeminist: he was the first major rock 'n' roll performer—and one of the few ever—to hire a female lead guitarist, Lady Bo Peggy Jones , in , and he employed female musicians throughout his career.
Board of Education. Anyone who hears that song as mere machismo misses a deeper reading of it. In case you didn't get what he was driving at, he spelled it out for you. His lyrics evoked a history that the white cover bands could never express: Africa, slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, peonage, discrimination.
The Yardbirds had a U. High John the Conqueror was a root that root doctors used. You might come back to Chicago from down South with some in your pocket. Bo Diddley was claiming kinship to a king. Bo Diddley made records for decades, improvising lyrics as he went along, creating a body of work that has yet to be appreciated in full.
He had a long life, and a good life. He should have had a better one. He complained bitterly that he had been screwed on the money his songs generated. He had to keep working to pay the bills, still traveling around in his 70s. He played for President and Mrs.
Kennedy, as well as for the inauguration of George H.
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