The world lost an icon in music with the passing of Rock N Roll legend/founding father Bo Diddley at 79.
Bo Didley TNT show
Bo Diddley live Guitar Performance
Bo Diddley would have been immensely rich had it been possible to copyright a rhythm.
The distorted shuffle beat he created on guitar in the mid-1950s is the taproot of rhythm and blues and rock music. Mr. Diddley, who died Monday of heart failure at 79, strongly influenced British guitarists Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones as well as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page during their days in the Yardbirds.In 1965, The Animals composed a tribute to Mr. Diddley called The Story of Bo Diddley, which traced the early days of R&B and gave Mr. Diddley his due as a pioneer of the music.
"I play the guitar as if I was playing the drums," Mr. Diddley once explained."It's mixed up with spiritual, sanctified rhythms, and the feeling I put into when I'm playing, I have the feeling of making people shout."
Mr. Diddley, born Otha Elias Bates McDaniel on Dec. 30, 1928 in McComb Mississippi, moved to Chicago at age seven. He was a consummate showman and self-mythologizer who named himself after the "diddley bow" - a one-string African guitar. He built his own exotically-shaped guitars, the most famous of which resembled a cigar box with strings. Mr. Diddley was one of rock's first bad boys. Who Do You Love, one of his best-known songs, begins with the lines "I walk 47 miles of barbwire/ I use a cobra snake for a necktie." His house, the song goes, is covered in rattlesnake hide and has a chimney "made outta human skulls."With his black glasses and low-slung guitar, Mr. Diddley was rock's gunslinger, always moving on. His first recording on the Chess/Checker label in 1955 was the two-sided No. 1 hit on the R&B charts Bo Diddley/ I'm A Man. source
