Bo Diddley 1928 - 2008 - News

Bo Diddley 1928 - 2008

5:15 PM GMT 02/06/2008

BO DIDDLEY, WHO DIED earlier today aged 79, was a man of many parts. Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger, claimed his album of 1961. Bo’s A Lumberjack, he’d decided by 1964. On 1957’s seismic Hey! Bo Diddley – the keynote of his legendary debut album on Checker – he was a farmer. “And on that farm he had some women,” went the song. “Women here and women there. Women, women, women everywhere.”

While there was obviously some confusion regarding his true vocation (apart from the women bit – he was pretty clear on that), there remains no debate about Diddley’s contribution to music.

Born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, in 1928, he was part of the revolutionary generation of young black Americans who made the journey up the Mississsippi river to Chicago, applying the blues they learned in and around the cotton fields and juke joints of the South to electric instruments in order to create something thrillingly new.

And no-one was more electric than Bo. His guitar sound was a massive, spooky, juddering thing. An ex-mechanic, he used technology to hotrod rock’n’roll, an acute modernism reflected in his famous rectangular Gretsch. Then there was the famed Bo Diddley beat, a variant on the old “shave and a haircut” rhythm (though he would always dispute its derivation), while his innovations stretched to the gender make-up of his band, drafting Peggy Jones (aka Lady Bo), Norma-Jean Wofford (aka The Duchess) and Cornelia Redmond (aka Cookie).

Without Bo Diddley’s ’50s and ’60s sides it’s impossible to imagine the relentless rock of The Rolling Stones, while his influence has been refracted by acts as diverse as Buddy Holly, U2, Creedence, The Stooges, The White Stripes and The Jesus & Mary Chain. In 1970 there was a controversial, but latterly re-evaluated excursion into heavy funk on the Black Gladiator album, and later he toured with The Clash and The Stones.

This writer was lucky enough to meet him in 1996, and I’m not sure I’ve ever met such an electric personality. Certainly, I will never forget his advice never to eat pig-derived foodstuffs. Was this a religious thing, I wondered?

“Naw. Y’see the pig don’t got no veins,” explained Bo. “So if it get bit by a rattlesnake then all the poison goes into its flesh. You’re eating poison!”

While something told me that it was unlikely for a pig to make do without veins, I frowned and nodded. Suddenly, a police car siren sounded outside the London hotel in which we were sat. Bo looked happy.

“Glad to see you’ve got yourself some proper sirenes,” he beamed. “When I came here in the ’60s, police cars went ‘bee-baw, bee-baw’. Ain’t no-one frightened of that bee-baw bullshit!”

Farewell Bo Diddley: rock’n’roll god, agricultural innovator, law-enforcement expert and all-round Renaissance man.

Writer: Danny Eccleston

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 5:15 PM GMT 02/06/2008

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