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| 25/01/2009

Bo Diddley, US rhythm and blues singer dies, aged 79

Bo Diddley, who has died aged 79, was one of the most important influences in the development of popular music, even though for much of his career he was seldom in the charts or in the recording studio.

Many of the biggest names in rock music — the Rolling Stones and The Who among them — recorded Diddley’s songs or wrote songs inspired by his example; his performance on stage also influenced a generation of rock musicians.

He was born Otha Ellas Bates (or, according to some sources, Ellas Otha Bates) on December 30 1928 into a poor farming family at Magnolia, Mississippi.

His father died soon after his birth, and his mother — who was 16 — entrusted him to the care of her cousin, Gussie McDaniel, at the nearby town of McComb.

In 1934 the McDaniel family moved to the largely black South Side area of Chicago, where the boy dropped the name Otha and became known as Ellas McDaniel, until his musical ambitions demanded that he take on a more catchy identity. In Chicago he was an active member of his local Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he played the violin, becoming proficient enough for the musical director to invite him to join the orchestra, with which he performed until the age of 18.

He was more impressed, however, by the pulsating music he heard at a local Pentecostal church. Also, he became interested in the guitar, later remarking: “I looked around and didn’t see too many black violinists. That’s when I grabbed the guitar, ’cause I seen plenty of black guitarists.”

Meanwhile he attended the Foster Vocational School, but dropped out aged 15. He became known as Bo Diddley — black slang for an endearing type of bully boy — and took to playing in the streets with a small band while supporting himself in a variety of menial jobs.

His band was known as the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, and one of the guitarists was Earl Hooker, later to become a well-known blues musician. Another member was a family friend, Billy Boy Arnold, on washboard. The band began to perform at amateur concerts, their music showing the clear influence of artists such as T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters.

By now Diddley’s financial state was somewhat complicated by his marriage to Ethel Mae Smith, and he not only worked as a labourer and truck driver but also took up boxing as a light heavyweight. Things improved, however, in 1951, when the group was offered work at Chicago’s leading R&B club, the 708; Diddley engaged a drummer (Frank Kirkland) and a maracas player (Jerome Green) to play alongside himself and Arnold in the first Bo Diddley Band. Diddley’s guitar work was combined with a solid percussion to make the deep, pounding beat that was to become his trademark.

During a long apprenticeship, which took the band around all the Chicago clubs and much of middle America, their blues-based material acquired a harder, rhythm ’n’ blues edge. Ever alert to commercial possibilites, Diddley saw that, in the wake of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, there would be a market for an earthier type of music. Leonard Chess, the founder of Chess Records in Chicago, was thinking along similar lines and was impressed by the demo tapes Diddley sent him.

On March 2 1955 Diddley and his group, augmented for the session with a piano, bass and a second drummer, recorded four songs. Two of these — I’m a Man and Bo Diddley — had been on the demo tape, and they now comprised his first single. They were to become his best-known songs.

The single reached No 2 in the rhythmn ’n’ blues chart, and on the strength of this the band was offered tours and television spots. When he returned to the studio he recorded Diddley Daddy, which featured Little Walter on harmonica and Willie Dixon on bass, with the doo-wop group the Moonglows providing backing vocals; it made No 11 in the same chart. Already artists such as the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly were picking up on Diddley’s hypnotic 4/4 beat, adapting it for their own songs.

Diddley, however, believed that it would be largely through live performance that he would find his public, and he was not slow to embrace the showmanship that is such an important element of popular music. He sported jackets of hideous plaid, adopted elephantine dance steps and favoured a box-like guitar, which looked home-made but was in fact built to his own design by Gretsch. (The guitar was once stolen, Diddley later finding it displayed in the window of a secondhand shop, and he had a whole series of them custom-made, often covered with fur or leather.)

In 1955 he performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, and toured extensively over the next few years. Elvis Presley was a fan, and is said to have derived some of his famous pelvic gyrations from watching Diddley on stage.

Other songs followed, among them Pretty Thing and I’m Looking for a Woman, and the popular Who Do You Love? Diddley played with Chuck Berry on Memphis Tennessee and Sweet Little Rock and Roller, and recorded a Kent Harris song, Cops and Robbers, which he made his own — even to the extent of claiming the copyright.

As he continued to tour, his record sales began to suffer, and he decided to heed Chess’s advice to adopt a softer sound. This resulted in I’m Sorry and Crackin’ Up (his first UK single, and a favourite of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both of whom — after the Beatles split up — recorded versions of it).

An unexpected hit came in 1959 with Say Man, a novelty record which had come about when a technician kept the tape running while Diddley and Jerome Green swapped insults during a session; it was Diddley’s only Top 20 pop hit. He went on to record Road Runner, which became another favourite of British bands. Between 1959 and 1963 he recorded nine albums, and in 1962 he performed for President Kennedy at the White House.

Diddley at first failed to make much of an impression in Britain (he was curiously billed as a jazz musician), but things changed in 1963 when he crossed the Atlantic for a concert at the New Victoria Theatre, sharing the bill with Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and the Rolling Stones. Diddley gave an even more bizarre performance than usual, even biting his guitar strings. Sales boomed and earlier recordings were re-issued; but the enthusiasm was short-lived, the British public preferring Diddley’s work as interpreted by bands such as the Yardbirds, with whom Eric Clapton played guitar on a hit version of I’m a Man. His songs were recorded in the 1960s by many British bands, among them the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Moody Blues.

Diddley continued to perform in the United States, touring the college circuits, and in the mid-1960s recorded the album Two Great Guitars with Chuck Berry. He made a film — The Bo Diddley Story — and recorded with Muddy Waters and Little Walter on Super Blues. In the late 1960s he appeared at the Toronto Pop Festival, an event recorded in the film Keep On Rockin’. By the late Sixties, however, audiences had moved on.

In 1973 and 1974 Diddley appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival; in 1979 he toured the United States with the British band the Clash; and in 1985 he performed at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia. In the 1980s he frequently collaborated with Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, touring in both America and Japan.

He was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1996 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm ’n’ Blues Foundation and in 1998 received another Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy at that year’s Grammy awards. In 2000 he was inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. He had been due to appear in Britain in June last year, but had to cancel the concerts because of ill health.

Bo Diddley was at least three, and probably four, times married. With his third wife, Kay, he had two daughters. He had two children by his marriage to Ethel Mae Smith.