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Rock 'N' Roll Icon Diddley Dies At 79

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By BEN RATLIFF

The New York Times

Published: June 3, 2008

Bo Diddley, 79, 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 of heart failure in Archer.

In the 1950s, Diddley - along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and others - helped reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building it on the templates of blues, southern gospel and R&B.

His original style of R&B 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' "Willie and the Hand Jive," Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," 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 company that issued his early songs was Chess-Checkers records, the storied Chicago-based labels that recorded Chuck Berry and other stars.

Diddley's 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.

Left 'Holding The Knob'

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

He was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame's second class in 1987.

Still, for all his fame, Diddley felt 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 those who borrowed his beat.

"I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob," he said in 2003.

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

Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago's South Side. Diddley said he had first heard the three-stroke/rest/two-stroke "Bo Diddley beat" in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children's game "hambone" used a similar rhythm.

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

Whatever the source, Diddley felt the beat's power.

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

His first trademark guitar was 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."

Broke Many Barriers

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 early violin playing, he said.

"My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action," he said, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, 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 the age of 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel "Tootsie" 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 door-to-door magazine saleswoman 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 and laws against racial intermarriage. During the late 1950s, 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 Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

Since the early '80s, Diddley lived in Archer, near Gainesville, owning 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse. In 1992, he married his fourth wife, Sylia R. Paiz.

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