Have you heard 'The Originator,' Bo Diddley?

[Brexiter]

Since this is the last Black Music Sunday of 2021 as December winds down, I want to close out the year celebrating an upcoming birthday on the next-to-last day of the month, and feature a musician whose impact on multiple musical greats who came after him still vibrates like the electric guitar strings he plucked and twanged.

Born on December 30, 1920—according to most biographies as Ellas Otha Bates, in McComb, Mississippi, with a later name change to Ellas McDaniel when living in Chicago with his mother’s cousin Gussie McDaniel—the world would soon come to know him as “Bo Diddley.”

“Bo Diddley … Bo Diddley have you heard?” is a song lyric that turns into an earworm for me along with the sound of a strumming and drumming guitar every time I hear it. With references to mojo and black cat bones, it always carries me back to time spent around folks who were root-workers practicing homegrown hoodoo. However the lyrics, no matter how they resonated with some of us, were not the true magic of Bo Diddley—it was his pulsing rhythm that became the heartbeat of what would become known worldwide as rock and roll.

Jay Luster, a staff writer at Rock On Magazine, dives into that era:

In the spring of 1955, rock and roll was still in the earliest stages of its takeover of the music industry. With the replacement of the 78 rpm shellac discs by the vinyl 45 a few years earlier, the industry had a durable product they believed could fuel a recorded music sales boom for their companies. They weren’t wrong. Bill Haley And His Comets led the way with 1954’s biggest hit Rock Around The Clock, and nearly overnight, retailers couldn’t keep enough of the seven-inch records with the weird sized hole in the middle on their shelves.

With musicians like Ray Charles and Fats Domino pointing the way forward, the growing teenage consumer feeding frenzy for the freshly pressed 45 rpm disks seemed to have no limits. Sam Phillips, the producer at Sun Records had already released music by rock ribbed blues men, Howlin Wolf and BB King, and is quoted as saying, “If I could find a white boy who could sing like a black man I’d make a million dollars.” In 1954, when Elvis Presley had a huge hit with Arthur Crudup’s 1946 song, “That’s Alright,” Phillips’ assumption was proven correct. While the song helped make Elvis a star, it also cracked the door open to black rhythm and blues artists. Soon, guys like Chuck Berry kicked the door in with crossover hits like “Maybelline” and “Johnny B.Goode.”

Hot on the heels of Chuck Berry was another Chicago blues man named Ellas McDaniel and he was about to change the world.

McDaniel tells his own story in this interview on the Speaking Freely TV series, hosted by Ken Paulson, which aired March 25, 2001. McDaniel also contradicts all the recorded biographies that give him the name “Otha.” He says emphatically, “My name is not Otha.”


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No discussion of McDaniel can be had without talking about his distinctive guitars.

Bo DIddley first made the rectangular guitar called the “Twang Machine” in 1958. Diddley drew inspiration from old homemade instruments by folk musicians, like the ones made from cigar boxes.#CigarBox #Twang #Blues #BoDiddley pic.twitter.com/b9WIlU1pqX

— NationalBluesMuseum (@NatBluesMuseum) May 22, 2021

Chris Huber, founder and editor of Extra Chill, wrote about that twang guitar in 2020:

Bo Diddley made a name for himself playing rectangular guitars, starting with one that he built himself in 1945, and continuing on through his entire career. According to a 2008 interview with Vintage Guitar, Bo Diddley’s first guitar was made from whatever materials he could find, including the pickup from an old Victrola record player. These guitars later became known as “cigar box guitars” after music promoter Dick Clark first referred to Bo Diddley’s handmade guitar that way, and are still popular among folk and blues musicians today, some of whom claim that they are the “most comfortable electric guitars ever built.”

In 1958, after Bo Diddley had already popularized the rectangular hand-made guitars and built a couple dozen of them himself, he approached the Fred Gretsch guitar company to request that they build a custom guitar for him. This made Bo Diddley one of the first guitarists to work with a guitar company on a custom electric instrument, and led to a collaborative effort between Diddley and the luthiers at Gretsch and resulted in three guitars being built. First, the famous rectangular guitar called The Twang Machine, plus two Jupiter Thunderbird guitars.

The Twang Machine guitar was styled after the rectangular cigar box guitars that he and other blues musicians had been playing at the time, except it was filled with state of the art electronic guts. Diddley played The Twang Machine and other rectangular and odd-shaped guitars for the rest of his career, all the way up until his death in 2008 at the age of 79.

McDaniel’s first R&B charts hits were an A-side and a B-side: “Bo Diddley” and “I’m A Man” released in 1955 on the Chess Records subsidiary of Checker Records. Several months after they were released, he was booked on The Ed Sullivan Show. Alan Light at Rolling Stone tells this version of the story:

For a young black singer and guitarist from Chicago with only a minor hit, getting booked on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1955 was a career-making opportunity. Sullivan asked him to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s country smash “Sixteen Tons”; instead, the young star unleashed the guitar maelstrom that introduced him to the world, and whose title bore his name, “Bo Diddley.”

The audience went wild, and Sullivan fumed, promising that Diddley would never appear on television again. Later, Diddley recalled the aftermath: “He says to me, ‘You’re the first colored boy ever double-crossed me on a song.’ And I started to hit the dude, because I was a young hoodlum out of Chicago, and I thought ‘colored boy’ was an insult.”

Here’s another version from The Ed Sullivan Show blog:

On November 20, 1955, hours before going on the air, Ed Sullivan heard Bo Diddley performing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” backstage, and asked him to perform that song for the show. Diddley agreed, but when he looked at the set list he saw “Bo Diddley. Sixteen Tons”. Not realizing that the “Bo Diddley” was referring to him and not his hit single, he took that to mean that he was supposed to play both songs back to back. Bo Diddley was cut off following the first song and after the performance Ed Sullivan banned the musician from the show for not following his directions.

No matter what really happened, he got banned by Sullivan, but the exposure to a national TV audience had its effect. He was now big time. Here’s the performance:


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Here’s the B-side, “I’m a Man.”


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When music critics and ethnomusicologists discuss his “sound,” most often referred to as “the Bo Diddley Beat,” there are various opinions about its origin, relating it to both West African juba and hambone. Here’s the take on it from the National Blues Museum, in St. Louis, Missouri:

Bo Diddley is much more than a name; rather, Bo Diddley is a legacy and musical style that has impacted the world’s take on music. Bo Diddley began to solidify his unique sound after picking up the guitar by reconstructing his musical equipment, such as his amplifier and his tremolo unit, which he made from various car parts and other household mechanisms. These adjustments complemented his violin-like techniques that featured distorted and muted string sounds.

This sound was first featured on the song recording “Bo Diddley,” and it uses a combination of maracas and guitar. Coined by Ellas McDaniel, the Bo Diddley Beat is a two-measure, syncopated pattern. This beat was similar to “ham boning,” also known as “Pattin’ Juba,” a traditional African American slapping rhythm. This musical technique allowed musicians to create different rhythms by hitting different body parts to create various sounds and tones. It can also be found in the roots of African-Cuban music.

In accompaniment with McDaniel’s unique sound, he created a pathway towards the creation of rock and roll. We can often identify this sound in songs by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Buddy Holiday, Johnny Otis. Bruce Springsteen, U2, and many more. Other rock and roll influences include Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Michelle Stolzenburg, writing about Bo Diddley as a “Rock ‘n’ Roll rebel“ highlights an aspect of the man and his musicians that is often overlooked:

Other than those box guitars, Bo had something else most musicians didn’t have at the time. He has his female instrumentalists starting off with Peggy Jones aka “Lady Bo” who replaces Bo Diddley’s guitarist Jody Williams.

Jones played with Diddley from 1957 until 1961. Following after is the guitarist Norma-Jean Wofford who takes over Lady Bo’s position. Soon after she is named “The Duchess” by Bo Diddley and accompanies Bo Diddley on his first England tour in 1962.

Another important collaborator of Bo Diddley is Debby Hastings. She stays much longer with him than the Duchess and Lady Bo. The electric bass player joined him around 1984 and has worked with him until his death in 2008. From 1994 on she is also his music director.

Here’s Lady Bo:

Peggy Jones was just 16 when she met Bo Diddley while walking by the Apollo Theater. By the next year, Peggy, or Lady Bo as she’d later be known, was a member of Diddley’s band and one of the first female lead guitarists in rock. https://t.co/Kbs8YLhGvu pic.twitter.com/swyYDGS1Wj

— WFMU (@WFMU) March 14, 2019

Musician and blogger Nathan Leigh at Afro-Punk profiles her:

Peggy Jones, aka Lady Bo grew up in New York City, attending Manhattan’s famed High School for the Performing Arts (of Fame fame) as a singer and dancer. She studied tap and ballet and trained in opera. She had been playing guitar for only 2 years when a chance encounter with Bo Diddley before a show at the legendary Apollo Theatre led to a life-changing gig as Bo Diddley’s lead guitarist. Diddley was awestruck by the sight of a beautiful young woman with a guitar and struck up a conversation. When Jerome Greene (the single luckiest maraca player in the history of music) ran out to tell Bo that dinner was being served in the dressing room, Bo invited Jones in. Jones recounts in an interview with Lea Gilmore:

After a while he opened his guitar, asked me to grab mine and play something. When I opened my case he laughed louder than anyone I’d heard before. I wanted to know what¹s funny? Hysterically he said what is that? He had never seen a Supro guitar. I said, “Now that’s a dumb question! First you probably never saw a girl carrying a guitar down the street before and want to know if I played it, did you think that was funny?” He said, “NO!” I continued, “then you insult my ax and I listen to Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Charlie Parker and I THINK I’ve heard of you! Do you think that’s funny?” He said, “No, but I like your attitude, let’s play something.” I said OK and the rest is history.

Lady Bo was quickly enlisted in the band as the replacement for Jody Williams who was drafted in 1957. Diddley taught Lady Bo his distinctive open tuning and unusual techniques. Diddley would later remark that “she knows every move I make… she is the only one that knows the original ways…” Her unique style which is simultaneously soulful and playful, making prominent use of guitar effects, is highlighted in her composition Aztec on which she plays all guitar parts.

We rarely see her credited for “Aztec”—and people who listen to it think it is Diddley playing. It isn’t.

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Following Lady Bo was “The Duchess,” Norma-Jean Wofford.

Norma-Jean Wofford (nicknamed "The Duchess") was a guitarist for Bo Diddley from 1962-1966. Wofford, who also appeared on many of Bo Diddley's albums, left the band when she married and decided to raise a family. pic.twitter.com/oSqlCFMARs

— I Have A Nerdy Mind #Blacklivesmatter (@blaksheepno1) May 30, 2020

Swiss music blogger Jan Derrer at Lost & Sound wrote about Debby Hastings, the final female member of the band:

Another important collaborator of Bo Diddley was Debby Hastings. She stayed much longer with him than the Duchess and Lady Bo. The electric bass player joined him around 1984 and worked with him until his death in 2008. From 1994 on she was also his music director. She played with him live and in the studio. You can hear her on Bo Diddley’s Grammy nominated album “A Man Amongst Men”.​

Debby Hastings started her career in Wisconsin and then moved to Memphis, TN where she opened for Muddy Waters and recorded at Stax Records under Isaac Hayes. She later settled in New York before joining Bo Diddley. Besides Bo Diddley, Debby Hastings played with many soul, rock ‘n’ roll, blues and rock legends like Sam Moore (of Sam and Dave), Willie Dixon, Edgar Winter, Dr. John, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. She toured with Ron Wood and Bo Diddley playing for both of them on the Gunslinger Tour and the subsequent DVD and live album called “Live At the Ritz”. In 2005 she played with Eric Clapton and Robbie Robertson at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Debby Hastings was with Bo Diddley in May 2007 when he had the stroke that ended his performing career. At the memorial for Bo Diddley she said: “He was the rock that the roll is built on.”

Hastings tentatively identified this humorous clip of a guitar conversation between herself and Diddley in its YouTube comments—saying that she thought it was from their Australia tour with the Everly Brothers in Sep. 1989:


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I love these pics of him found on Twitter.

Bo Diddley #rocknroll Photo by Robert Knight Archive/Redferns pic.twitter.com/pmdAvCASZ0

— bluesharp (@bluezharp) December 17, 2021

Bo Diddley pic.twitter.com/a0WVE2KUhv

— IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE, PLAY ON (@steveratcliff14) December 15, 2021

McDaniel also appeared in Nike cross-training ads “Bo Knows” with Bo Jackson in 1989 and 1990, which introduced him to a younger generation.


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I’ll close with one of my favorites from Bo Diddley—“Who Do You Love,” which he wrote and recorded in 1956. Here he is performing it live on The Joan Rivers Show in 1987.


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My answer: Love you, Bo Diddley!

Join me in the comments section below for more, and be sure to post your favorites.