Bo Diddley built rock 'n' roll from scratch

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own chicken-scratch 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. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.

In the 1950s, 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 and rhythm and blues. His original style of R&B influenced generations of musicians. And his syncopated beat became a stock rhythm of rock 'n' roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," Johnny Otis' "Willie and the Hand Jive," Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," The Who's "Magic Bus," Bruce Springsteen's "She's the One" and U2's "Desire," among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs such as "Bo Diddley," "Who Do You Love," "Mona," "Crackin' Up," "Say, Man," "Ride On Josephine" and "Road Runner," his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother-wit and sexual cockiness. They were playful and radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square, and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Diddley was a wild performer, jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrangled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley borrowed from Diddley's stage moves; Jimi Hendrix did, too.

Still, for all his fame, Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock 'n' roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who borrowed his beat. "I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob," he said in 2003.

Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by his mother's first cousin, Gussie McDaniel, who had three children of her own. After the death of her husband, McDaniel took the family to Chicago, where young Otha's name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel.

A 'bow-legged guy'

In 1954, Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, with Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess, of Chess records, liked the demo, especially the tremolo on the guitar, a sound that seem to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

The next day, as the band and their soon-to-be producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name, Arnold said, described a "bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy."

Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, "Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring." "Bo Diddley" became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart.

On songs like "Who Do You Love," his guitar style -- bright, chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time -- was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.

"My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action," he told George White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

During the late 1950s, Diddley's band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma Jean Wofford, whom Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

Since the early '80s, Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, owning 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars. In 1992, he married Sylvia Paiz, his fourth wife.

Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry started rock 'n' roll, and the fact that he couldn't financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

"I tell musicians, 'Don't trust nobody but your mama,"' he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. "And even then, look at her real good."