Rock pioneer Bo Diddley dies at age 79

The Bo Diddley rhythm is the pulse beat of the universe. Or so it seems sometimes, so primal and basic is that three-two "hambone" pattern introduced on his first, self-named 1955 hit, derived from ancient African rhythms and overlaid with eerie, tremolo guitar. It's "one of the fundamental building blocks of the new musical vocabulary" of rock 'n' roll, said blues scholar Pete Welding.

Diddley, 79, who died of heart failure Monday at his home in Archer, Fla., was not as luminous a star as his labelmate Chuck Berry, or contemporaries Little Richard and James Brown, but his influence is every bit as pervasive. He came to recording late, at 26, but like Berry arrived fully formed, with the double-sided No. 1 R&B hit Bo Diddley/I'm a Man displaying his trademark beat, wit, swagger and penchant for third-person references. (He would later write songs declaring Bo Diddley was a gunslinger, a lumberjack, a lover and more.)
It was a startling record; as George Thorogood told Rolling Stone, "You listen to Bo Diddley and you sit there and you get numb." Keith Richards, whose Rolling Stones covered a number of Diddley tunes, told the same publication, "Bo was fascinatingly on the edge. There was something African going on there. His style was outrageous."

Diddley was born Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., his surname changing to McDaniel after his mother's cousin, who raised him. Moving to Chicago, he learned violin before picking up the guitar. His professional name likely derives from the one-stringed Southern instrument the diddley bow, on which his famed rhythm was often played, although he told several other stories about the name's origin.

Although his success was relatively fleeting after his initial splash — he never surpassed No. 20 on the pop charts and amassed just 10 R&B hits in his lifetime — he was enormously influential in countless ways beyond the omnipresence of the beat that bears his name.
Just three further examples:
•Bo Diddley's a rap progenitor. His biggest pop hit, 1959's Say Man, was even more boggling than Bo Diddley, its lyrics consisting solely of a session of the dozens, in which he and maraca player Jerome Green traded insults and brags in a manner that anticipated both the spoken-word style and larger-than-life lyrical content of rap.
•Bo Diddley's a guitar wizard. Not only sonically, although the songs that borrow his style number in the hundreds, but as a designer. He played and was photographed with innumerable space-age, custom-designed guitars of all shapes and sizes, inspiring later axe innovators such as ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen.

•Bo Diddley's a feminist. Well, not that you could ever tell from his songs, but he was one of the first blues bandleaders to feature a female musician, when the Duchess (Norma-Jean Wofford) began playing guitar with him in the late '50s.

His only hit after 1962 was 1967's Ooh Baby, and he wandered down some odd musical byways in later years, even recording a bubblegum single (a payback of sorts, since his beat and nursery-rhyme lyrics were a major influence on that deceptively simple pop genre). He opened for The Clash on their first U.S. tour and continued to tour actively, suffering a stroke after a show in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in May 2007.

He once boasted in song that he was "500% more man." As an outsized personality with the musical genius to justify the ego, he certainly was.

Source: USA Today