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Rest in Peace, Bo Diddley.
By Mark | June 7, 2008
Bo Diddley died last week at the age of 79.
Diddley was an American music pioneer, and I mean that in a non-hyperbolic way; whenever a musician dies there is a tendency to call them “groundbreaking” or an “innovator,” and that irritates the heck out of me. In this case, though, it’s true. Bo Diddley defied assignment into a musical enre because Bo Diddley defied convention. He played on a rectangular guitar that he designed himself, and the music that came out of it straddled the blues, rock, country, pop, calypso, and folk. If you haven’t heard anything by him, a good starting place is Chess records’ “Bo Diddley: His best.” I picked up a copy of that when I was in college, and I listened the hell out of it. What’s funny is that the famed “Bo Diddley Beat” figures prominantly on many songs, but Bo Diddley made songs that ranged far from that sound; “Pills” is a song about drug use that sounds like it could have been written by a completely different person from the writer of the agressive “Bring to Jerome.”
My favorite little bit of trivia about Diddley is that his song “I’m a Man” directly caused the creation of one of the greatest blues hits in history, “Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters. The songs are basically the same chords, with Waters and Diddley sharing writing credit on the latter (along with Mel London). “Mannish Boy” went on to be the medium by which the chords and structure of “I’m a Man” were transmitted to a larger audience, much like how Greek/Hellenic culture, science, and philosophy were transmitted to the larger world by the later Hellenistic empires that sprang up after the death of Alexander the Great.
Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote an obituary for Diddley here. There is also a discussion of Diddley in the latest podcast of Sound Opinions, which can be found here.
R.I.P. Bo Diddley, 1928-2008.
Coincidentally, this is the weekend of the Chicago Blues Fest, the event that single-handedly caused my GPA to plummet every spring quarter in college. Somehow, almost every year, the Blues Fest would be scheduled on the weekend before finals, which would mean that all my hard work (sic) over the course of the quarter would be lost in one final push towards mediocrity. I should have studied harder, I should have kept my nose to the grindstone. That said, I’ve seen Ray Charles and Koko Taylor and Buddy Guy, so who am I to complain?
UPDATE: His funeral was apparently rockin’.
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June 8th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Amen! Great article! KoKo Taylor’s “I’m a Woman was also inspired by Diddley’s I’m a Man, but you know that I’m sure :)