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"I'm different from all the other entertainers," the man in the black Stetson hat with the square guitar in his hands said. "I got my own little thing going. I'm the roots of rock and roll, and the beginning of all this mess that I didn't get the credit for."
That's Bo Diddley talking, the man who invented the beat heard 'round the world. Bo's beat shook you from the inside out, a throbbing pulse that changed the heartbeat of rock 'n' roll. Although it sounded like it came from tribal drums pounding out messages on a jungle telegraph, Diddley said it came from the heart of white America. "Where I actually came up with that beat, I was trying to play Gene Autry's song 'I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle' and struck up on boomty boomty boom ... boom boom," the guitarist said in a 2003 interview from his home in Archer, Fla.
Diddley, 79, passed away June 2 at his Florida home from heart failure. CBS news reports the singer had been incapacitated by a heart attack in August of last year and a stroke three months before that had left him with speaking difficulties. He was undergoing rehabilitation at his Archer home.
It wasn't the guitarist's first bout with adversity. Bo Diddley was a fighter. A Chess Records bio says the man born Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., got his Diddley nickname at the age of 14 when the family moved to Chicago. Tired of being picked on, the youngster took up boxing and was soon pounding his former tormentors into submission. The Chess story from the 1990 box set has Diddley saying the whupped ones dropped the Diddley nickname on him which he thinks was derogatory slang for a bully. But Diddley denies he said that. "I don't know who came up with that shit," he said angrily. "I never was a bully. People have a habit of trying to name something they don't know what the hell they're talking about because they don't understand in the first place. No, I got that name, I used to box around the neighborhood a little bit, the kids gave me that name in grammar school."
It's not the first battle the guitarist had with Chess Records. Diddley claimed that Chess, along with other labels he recorded for, never gave him all his royalties. "All around the world, man, I got records, CDs and all this other shit that I ain't never seen a dime from," Diddley said. "They lied and said that they paid Bo Diddley. I don't know, there must be another one somewhere, but it didn't come to my house."
Even though he never got all the monetary rewards he felt he was due, Diddley still had the musical world's respect and earned worldwide fame for his signature sound.
He toured regularly until his health begin to fail a year ago. His live performances were as incendiary as his personality. A few years ago at a show in Ziggy's in Winston-Salem, the audience was chanting the refrain of "Put A Hump In Your Back" when Diddley suddenly changed the lyrics. "Put it out, put it out, put it out," he yelled. The audience went along, chanting "Put it out!" until the guitarist abruptly stopped playing, pointing at an audience member and yelling, "Put it out! Godammit! I mean it! I smell something funny. I see you! Put it out! Put it out or I'll leave the stage!" Detecting the aroma of marijuana, Diddley apparently experienced a flashback to his former career as a deputy sheriff when he spotted a fan taking a toke near the front of the stage.
"Put it out, now," he shouted. "I don't care what you do on our own. Smoke all of that shit you want, just don't do that stuff around me." The offending joint extinguished, Diddley dropped his lawman guise, returning to knocking out his signature beat.
The beat sustained Diddley throughout a career that spanned five decades. In the true spirit of rock and roll, Diddley was a rebel. He refused to tone down his music, getting banned from the nationally syndicated Ed Sullivan Show early in his career in '55 for substituting his signature tune "Bo Diddley" for the scheduled "16 Tons." When the hits stopped coming in the late '60s, Diddley hit the road, thumping out that beat for new generations to absorb.
He never gave up hope for a resurgence of his sound, and had plans to get together with other older artists ("guys of my caliber") to buy his own radio station. "Because right now, guys think we're all finished," he said. "No, I just got started, baby." Diddley proved a fighter to the end. "I feel I gave to the world and still am giving to the world of music a whole lot," said the man who called himself the originator. "I got some things I'm gonna shock people with before I decide to say I'm quittin'."
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