Bo Diddley, a Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneer, Is Dead at 79
Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.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 reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building it on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.
...Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp — in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty “Shave and a haircut, two bits.”
The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jockomo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.
Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Pretty Thing” and “Bo Diddley,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)
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