[Dixielandjazz] Bo Diddley Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Here is Bo Diddley's NY Times Obit.

Cheers
Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

June 3, 2008 -  NY TIMEs - by Ben Ratliff
Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own  
guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers,  
rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr.  
Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a  
stroke while touring in Iowa.

In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with  
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped  
to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the  
templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American  
vernacular culture.

His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of  
musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two  
strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s  
“Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s  
“She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like  
“Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,”  
“Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up  
with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel  
bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of  
slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and  
radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a  
large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed  
it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Mr. Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his  
toes and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument,  
sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been  
supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a  
father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated  
him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who  
had borrowed his beat.

“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and  
left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling  
Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of  
originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall.

In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr.  
Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look  
at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said  
during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical  
audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna  
like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have  
to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like  
the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”

Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city  
about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by  
Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson. After  
the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel, who had three children of her  
own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed  
to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and  
sent him to school.

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He  
described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street  
toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the  
tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer  
Baptist Church, where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas  
studied classical violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12,  
when a family member gave him an acoustic model.

He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar  
as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before  
graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo  
with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass. The  
group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Jody Williams,  
then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.

The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive  
Cats, started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were  
sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman  
because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden  
board sprinkled with sand.

Mr. Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the  
early days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a  
picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator  
operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn  
professional.

In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band,  
which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of  
Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the  
guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as  
a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men  
who were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal,  
they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when  
Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged  
guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White  
in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”

That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact  
that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta,  
often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two  
nails in a board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however,  
Mr. Diddley had never played one.

In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new  
song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.”  
“Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the  
Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the  
Billboard singles chart.

Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — three- 
stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in a  
church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The  
children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty  
that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been  
popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A- 
Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.

Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs  
like “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom- 
toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also  
arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of  
praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the  
Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy  
Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to  
play “Sixteen Tons,” the song popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford.  
Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead.  
Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that  
he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play  
again on a network show for 10 years.

For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the  
Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her  
book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess,  
Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events  
is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against  
projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in  
the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one  
of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the  
DeArmond Model 60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he  
had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and  
an alarm-clock spring.

His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the  
circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he  
had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the  
same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar  
called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken- 
scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension  
of his early violin playing, he said.

“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,”  
he told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move  
around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said,  
he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down  
to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first  
marriage, at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His  
second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s.  
He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount  
Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.

Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when,  
backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay  
Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short  
order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against  
intermarriage.

During the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist,  
Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely  
any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr.  
Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said,  
to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr.  
Diddley make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby  
Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a  
foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large  
part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly  
playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr.  
Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing  
with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the  
opening act.

But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the  
picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the  
Byrdsquickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr.  
Diddley moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy  
sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble  
hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his  
contract expired in 1974.

His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations  
with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace  
as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious,  
like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike  
advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979  
tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H.  
W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/ 
Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the  
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the  
National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a  
musician of lasting historical importance.

Since the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near  
Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His  
passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac  
hearse.

The last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his  
spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His  
survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi  
D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth  
Haynes; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great- 
great-grandchildren.

Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and  
drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a  
concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and  
was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28  
he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.

Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock  
’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he  
had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

“I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an  
interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at  
her real good.”




Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband