Charles Hughes writes:

Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
the boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred?
-Langston Hughes

Bo Diddley passed away on Sunday night, following a long string of health troubles that included heart attacks and strokes.  Diddley was among the ever-shrinking handful of rock-and-roll pioneers, who forever changed American popular music and culture in the late 1950s with a brief, brilliant blast that challenged conceptions of race, sex and generation as fundamentally as jazz did before it, or hip-hop would later. His catalog contains some of the songs that most defined the genre, and his unflinching individuality provided a model for artists – of all genres – for years and years to come.

He was born Ellas Bates, later to become Ellas McDaniel, outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi. As a youth, his family (like so many African-Americans in the “Great Migrations” between the World Wars) moved to Chicago, where the young man took up classical violin. This early musical training was illustrative of the creative and inquisitive mind that many saw in McDaniel, and this mind soon became the source of a self-built guitar (the trademark red rectangle that he built in high-school shop class), and an entirely new persona, Bo Diddley, a name that McDaniel inverted from the “diddley bow,” a homemade, one-stringed instrument that he remembered from his youth. Armed with his guitar, and his new identity, Diddley began working for Chess Records, the now-legendary Chicago label that was the home of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James and Chuck Berry, among many others.  Many who frequented Chess at the time remember Bo as a kind of talent scout for the label, scouring the fertile streets of Chicago’s South Side for potential additions to the roster.  (He also, apparently, was something of a studio manager, helping to arrange and run sessions.)

When he got a chance to record, he quickly announced his arrival by releasing the song “Bo Diddley,” a series of self-aggrandizing rhymes punctuated by a highly distinctive rhythm.  Indeed, Diddley’s ultimate legacy certainly and justifiably begins with this “Bo Diddley beat,” a shave-and-a-haircut pattern that marked Diddley’s work as unique, and then – accordingly – was copied by artists from Buddy Holly to Bruce Springsteen.  While variants of the rhythm can be heard in earlier recordings (particularly in the sounds of New Orleans’ “second line,” and even in some of the country recordings that Diddley credited with helping him develop the rhythm), there is no real precedent for what Bo was able to accomplish, particularly in the way that he centered the pattern around furious strokes of his guitar.  Using his self-built instrument, which possessed a unique shape that helped foster the pulsing style, Diddley manipulated the sound and texture of his electric lines to replicate (in both his words and those of later critics) the sounds of African drums, adding the six-string in to the polyrhythmic chorus that was further strengthened by every member of his ensemble.  (Maracas player Jerome Green, memorialized in the strutting “Bring It To Jerome,” was a key participant in this, as well as being Diddley’s right-hand man through most of his great run. Props must also be paid to Peggy “Lady Bo” Jones and “The Duchess,” Norma-Jean Woodford, each of whom distinguished themselves as hard-rocking female instrumentalists in an era when inter-gender bands were even rarer than their interracial counterparts.)  Even when not working within the framework of the “Bo Diddley beat,” rhythms are central to nearly all of Diddley’s great recordings, driving the motorvation of “Cadillac,” powering Bo’s gleeful “Roadrunner,” bumping the groove on “Pretty Thing,” and so on.

He was also a vocalist of surprising versatility, capable of crooning his way through open-hearted love songs like “Mona,” or striking a tougher stance on the gangsta blues of “I’m A Man.”  In addition, although he wasn’t the songwriter of his label-mate Chuck Berry, Bo’s compositional talents shouldn’t be underrated.  His string of namesake songs remained surprisingly fresh and entertaining even as they stretched to the point of absurdity, and many of his other originals – from “Ride On Josephine” to “Crackin’ Up” – revealed deft craftsmanship and surprising stylistic eclecticism.  At his best, like on the choogling “You Can’t Judge A Book (By Looking At The Cover)” or the unbridled ferocity of “Who Do You Love,” Diddley linked his lyrics, rhythms and identity into a veritable whirlwind, a full-throttle assertion of strength and ingenuity.

But Bo Diddley’s impact goes far beyond his trademark guitar style, or even the raft of classic songs that he composed and/or performed.  One of Diddley’s greatest, and yet most under-appreciated, gifts to American popular culture is that he – more than any of his contemporaries – brought the persona of the playful, sexual “trickster” to the rock and roll era.  Particularly when writing in character, Diddley’s boasts, toasts and stories reflect traditions that date back to the very African roots to which his guitar style more directly called back.  Diddley – with his roots in Mississippi – clearly understood the legacies that he tapped into, and often deployed specific tropes or story elements into his songs. From signifying monkeys to back door men, Bo Diddley’s records and persona were a living, rocking tribute to many of the oldest, strongest and most dynamic cultural traditions in black America.  Here, again, “Who Do You Love?” is a standout, mixing the funny, the flirty and the flat-out dangerous, like Eshu Elegba with an electric backbeat.   When Bo sings that he’s “got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind/I’m just 22 and I don’t mind dyin’,” he sounds both entirely sincere and completely self-aware, performing stark reality and glorious fakery at the very same time.

His legacy is large, but he didn’t have many hits, and his moment of prominence was neither as sizable nor as lengthy as that of most other first-wave pioneers (at least those who lived past 1960).  His biggest chart performer was “Say Man,” in which Bo and Jerome Green quite literally play the dozens over a skipping beat, and he only reached the lower ranks of Billboard’s charts on a few other occasions.  But that didn’t stop him.  In fact, Bo Diddley’s later music is – in many ways – as interesting as his initial recordings, if nowhere near as important.  In the 1960s and 1970s, Diddley released a series of funk-and-soul influenced LPs, which contain some striking music, but also failed to reach a wide audience.  He spent the last three decades on the oldies circuit, playing to loyal audiences and occasionally receiving a wider moment of cultural cachet.  (Nike’s “Bo Knows Bo” ad campaign, which featured Diddley prominently scolding two-sport athlete Bo Jackson, was the most obvious.)  As he aged, his live performances got more scattershot, often devolving into rambling, extended improvisations from Diddley over the trademark beat.  I witnessed such a performance, and was both saddened and strangely emboldened by the bitter perseverance that permeated the performance of this true original.  Certainly, the legacy of Bo Diddley wasn’t enough to entirely satisfy the dissatisfaction of Elias McDaniel: He famously remarked that he opened the door, only to watch everyone pass through while he held the knob.

After Bo’s passing, Dave Marsh suggested that – despite his wide influence – Bo Diddley is truly unique in the pantheon of American popular music, neither imitated nor duplicated.  The fact that an artist can leave a legacy of such rumbling magnitude, while also maintaining his individuality, is truly remarkable. Of course, that’s probably cold comfort, given Bo’s lack of career stability or financial windfall.  God knows he deserved both those things, but – in their absence – I hope that this great American musician took some solace in his weighty contributions to our collective culture.  He was a mighty man, a gunslinger, and an incredibly talented artist.   But his beat – like the “boogie-woogie rumble” of Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” – will never fade.  And neither, hopefully, will the example that Bo Diddley set for those who hope to follow him.

Bo Diddley “Who Do You Love” (Chess, 1957) and “Ride on Josephine” (Chess, 1960)

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