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Shallow Nation

June 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm

Bo Diddley, a Founding Father of Rock ‘n’ roll (1928-2008) Video Tribute

Bo Diddley circa 1958

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame singer-songwriter-guitarist Bo Diddley was far more than a rock legend; he was one of the founding fathers of rock and roll. Bo Diddley has died at 79.

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.

Bo Diddley in 1959

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.

Bo Diddley performing at the Apollo Theater in 1964

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.

Source: Bo Diddley, a Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneer, Dies at 79

Bo Diddley performing with Chuck Berry

The Bo Diddley rhythm is the pulse beat of the universe. Or so it seems sometimes, so primal and basic is that 5/4 “hambone” syncopation introduced on his first, self-named 1955 hit, derived from ancient African rhythms and overlaid with eerie, tremolo guitar.

It’s “one of the fundamental building blocks of the new musical vocabulary” of rock ‘n’ roll, says blues scholar Pete Welding.

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Although his success was relatively fleeting after his initial splash — he never surpassed No. 20 on the pop charts and amassed 10 R&B hits in his lifetime — he was enormously influential beyond the omnipresence of the beat that bears his name.

Just three further examples:

•Bo Diddley’s a rap progenitor. His biggest pop hit, 1959’s Say Man, was even more boggling than Bo Diddley, its lyrics consisting solely of a session of the dozens in which he and maraca player Jerome Green traded insults and brags in a manner that anticipated the spoken-word style and larger-than-life lyrical content of rap.

•Bo Diddley’s a guitar wizard. Not only sonically — although the songs that borrow his style number in the hundreds — but as a designer. He played and was photographed with innumerable space-age, custom-designed guitars of all shapes and sizes, inspiring later axe innovators such as ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen.

•Bo Diddley’s a feminist. Well, not that you could ever tell from his songs, but he was one of the first blues bandleaders to feature a female musician, when the Duchess (Norma-Jean Wofford) began playing guitar with him in the late ’50s.