Episode 30: “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley

A History of Folk Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 30 Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley.

Welcome to the final part of our trilogy about chess records.

Last week we looked at Chuck Berry.

This week we're going to deal with someone who may even have been more important.

One of the many injustices in copyright law, and something that we'll have a lot of cause to mention during the course of this series, is that for the entire time period covered by this podcast, it was impossible to copyright a groove or a rhythm, but you could copyright a melody line and lyric.

And this has led to real interracial injustice.

In general, black musical culture in the USA has emphasized different aspects of musical invention than white culture has.

While white American musical culture, particularly rich white musical culture, has stressed inventive melodies and harmonic movement.

Think of, say, Bert Bacharach or George Gershwin.

It has not historically stressed rhythmic invention.

On the other hand, black musical culture culture has stressed that above everything else.

You'll notice that all the rhythmic innovations we've talked about in this series so far, like Boogie Woogie and the Backbeat and the Trecio rhythm, all came from black musicians.

That's not of course to say that black musicians can't be melodically inventive or white musicians rhythmically.

I'm not here saying black people have a great sense of rhythm or any of that racist nonsense.

I'm just talking about the way that different cultures have prioritised different things.

But this means that when black musicians have produced innovative work, it's not been possible for them to have any intellectual property ownership in the result.

You can't steal a melody by Bacharach, but anyone can play a song with a boogie beat, or a shuffle, or a trecio,

or with the bow-diddley beat.

Elias McDaniel's distinctive sound came about because he started performing so young that he couldn't gain entrance to clubs, and so he and his band had to play on street corners.

But you can't cart a drum kit around and use it on the streets, So Mac Daniel and his band came up with various inventive ways to add percussion to the act.

At first they had some one who would come round with a big bag of sand and empty it on to the pavement.

He'd then use a brush on the sand, and the noise of the brushing would provide percussion.

At the end of the performance this man, whose name was Sam Daniel, but was called Sandman by everyone, would sweep all the sand back up and put put it back into his bag for the next show.

Eventually, though, Sandman left the band, and McDaniel hit on the idea of using his girlfriend's neighbour Jerome Green as part of the act.

We heard Jerome last week playing on Maybelline, but he's someone who there is astonishingly little information about.

He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and you'll find barely more than a few paragraphs about him online.

No one even knows when he was born or died, if he died, though he seems to have disappeared around 1972.

And this is quite astonishing when you consider that Green played on all Bo Diddley's classic records, and sang duet on a few of the most successful ones, and he played on many of Chuck Berry's, and on various other records by Willie Dixon, Otis Span, The Moonglows.

Yet when you Google him, the third hit that comes up is about Robson Green and Jerome Flynn, a 90s soft pop duo who span out of a soap opera.

At first, Jerome's job was to pass the hat around and collect the money, but McDaniel decided to build Jerome a pair of maracas and teach him how to play.

And he learned to play very well indeed.

adding a Latin sound to what had previously been just a blues band.

Jerome's maracas weren't the only things that Elias McDaniel built though.

He had a knack for technology, though he was always rather modest about his own abilities.

He built himself one of the very first tremolo systems for a guitar, making something out of old car bits and electronic junk that would break the electronic signal up.

Before commercial tremolo systems existed, McDaniel was the only one who could make his guitar sound like that.

The choppy guitar, with its signal breaking up deliberately, and the maracas being shook frantically, gave McDaniel's music a rhythmic drive unlike anything else in rock and roll.

McDaniel and his band eventually got their music heard by Leonard Chess at Chess Records.

Chess was impressed by a song called Uncle John, which had lyrics that went Uncle John's got corn ain't never been shooked, Uncle John's got daughters ain't Never Been to School.

But he said the song needed less salacious lyrics, and he suggested retitling it Bo Diddley, which also became the stage name of the man who, up until now, had been called Elias McDaniel.

The new lyrics were inspired by the black folk song Hambone, which a few years earlier had become a novelty hit.

Hamble, Hamble, have you heard?

Pop's gonna find me a mocking bird.

And if that mocking bird don't sing, Pop's gonna find me a diamond ring.

And if that diamond ring don't shine, Pop's gonna catch me and fly the diamond.

Hamble!

Yeah!

Now, I have to be a bit careful here, because I'm talking about something that's from a different culture from my own, and my understanding of it is that of an outsider.

To me,

Hambone seems to be a unified thing that's part song, part dance, part game.

But my understanding may be very, very flawed, and I don't want to pretend to knowledge I don't have.

But this is my best understanding of what Hambone is.

Hambone, like many folk songs, is not in itself a single song, but a collection of different songs with similar elements.

The name comes from a dance which, it is said, dates back to enslaved people attempting to entertain themselves.

Slaves in most of the US were banned from using drums, because it was believed they might use them to send messages to each other, so when they wanted to dance and sing music, they would slap different parts of their own bodies to provide percussive accompaniment.

Now, I tend to be a little dubious of narratives that claim that aspects of 20th century black culture date back to slavery, or, as people often claim, to Africa.

A lot of the time, these turn out to be urban myths of that ringa ringa roses is about the bubonic plague kind.

One of the real tragedies of of slavery is that the African culture that the enslaved black people brought over to the US was largely lost in the ensuing centuries, and so there's a very strong incentive to try to find things that could be a continuation of that.

But that's the story around Hambone, which is also known as the Juba Beat.

Another influence Dudley would always cite for the lyrical scansion is the song Hey Baba Reba, which he would usually misremember as having been by either Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan, but was actually by Lionel Hampton.

Yes, your baby knows.

But the important thing to note is that the rhythm of all these records is totally different from the rhythm of the song Bo Diddley.

There's a bit of misinformation that goes around in almost every article about Diddley, saying the Bo Diddley beat is just just the hambone beat.

And while Diddley would correct this, in almost every interview he ever gave, the misinformation would persist, to the point that when I first heard hambone, I was shocked, because I'd assumed that there must at least have been some slight similarity.

There's no similarity at all.

And that's not the only song where I've seen claims that there's a bow diddley beat where none exists.

As a reminder, here's the actual bow Diddley rhythm.

Now the PhD thesis on the development of the backbeat, which I talked about back in episode 2, claims that the beat appears on about 13 records before diddleys, mostly by by people we've discussed before, like Louis Jordan, Johnny Otis, Fats Domino, and Roy Brown.

But here's a couple of examples of the songs that Thesis cites.

Here's Mard De Gras in New Orleans by Fats Domino.

And here's That's Your Last Boogie by Joe Swift, produced by Johnny Otis.

There was a chick, what a

As you can hear, they both have something that's sort of the bow diddly beat, but not really, among their other rhythms.

It's most notable at the very start of That's Your Last Boogie.

That's what's called a clarve beat.

It's sort of like the Trecio, with an extra bum bum on the end.

Bum bum bum bum bum.

That's not the bow diddly beat.

The bow diddly beat actually varies subtly from bar to bar, but it's generally a sort of chunka chunk chunka chunka junka.

It certainly stresses the five beats of the clarve, but it's not the clarvé and nor is it the shape and a haircut two bits rhythm other people seem to claim for it.

Most ridiculously, Wikipedia even claims that the Andrews Sisters version of Lord Invader's great Calypso song, Vum and Coca-Cola, has the bow deadly beat.

If you ever go down Trinidad,

they make you feel so very glad.

Calypso sing and make up rhyme, guarantee you one real good fine time drinking rum and coca cola.

Go down point incumana,

both mother and daughter, working for the Yankee dollar

Both records have maraccas, but that's about it.

Incidentally, that song was, in the Andrews sisters' version, credited to a white American thief, rather than to the black Trinidadian men who wrote it.

Sadly appropriate for a song about the exploitation of Trinidadians for the Yankee dollar.

But none of these records have the Bow Diddley Beat, despite what anyone might say.

None of them even sound very much like Diddley's beat at all.

The origins of the Bow Diddley Beat were, believe it or not, with Gene Autry.

We've talked before about Autry, who was the biggest Western music star of the late 30s and early 40s, and who inspired all sorts of people you wouldn't expect, from Les Paul to Hank Ballard.

But Diddley hit upon his rhythm when trying to play Autry's I've Got Spurs That Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.

I got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle

as I go riding merrily along.

And they sing, oh, ain't you glad you're single?

And that song ain't so very far along.

Oh, Lily Bell.

No, I don't see the resemblance either.

But this ties back into what we were talking about last week, with the influence of country musicians on the blues and RB musicians at chess.

And if you become familiar with his later work, it becomes clear that Diddley truly loved the whole iconography of the Western and country music.

He did albums called Have Guitar Will Travel, named after the Western TV show, Have Gun Will Travel, and Bo Diddley as a Gunslinger.

Diddley's work is rooted in black folklore, things like Hambone, but also the figure of Stagger Lee and other characters like the signifying monkey.

But it should be understood that black American folklore has always included the image of the black cowboy.

The combination of these influences, the hambone lyrical ideas, the cowboy rhythm, and the swaggering character Diddley created for himself, became this.

If that diamond ring don't shine,

he gonna take it to a private eye.

If that private eye can't see,

he can not take the ring upon me.

The B side to the record, meanwhile, was maybe even more important.

It's also an early example of Diddley not just reusing his signature rhythm.

The popular image of Diddley has him as a one-ide artist, remaking the same song over and over again.

And certainly, he did often return to the Bo Diddley beat.

But he was a far more interesting artist than that, and recorded in a far wider variety of styles than you might imagine.

And in I'm a Man, he took on another artist's style, beating Muddy Waters at his own game.

I'm a Man was a response to Waters's earlier Hoochie Coochie Man.

The gypsy woman told my mother

before I was born,

I got a boy charge coming.

He's gonna be a son of a gun,

he's gonna make pretty women

jump and shout.

Then the world wanna know

what this all about, but you know, hello.

Hoochie Coochie Man had been written for Muddy Waters by Willie Dixon, and was, as far as I can tell, the first blues record ever to have that d ner na ner na myth that later became the riff that for most people defines the blues.

Hoochie Coochie Man had managed to sum up everything about Waters's persona in a way that Waters himself had never managed with his own songs.

It combined sexual braggadocio with hoodoo lore.

The character Waters was singing in was possessed of supernatural powers from the day he was born, and he used those powers to make pretty women jump and shout.

He had a black cat bone and a mojo and a John the Conqueror root.

It was a great biff and a great persona and a great record, but it was still a conventionally structured 16-bar blues with the normal three chords that almost all blues records have.

But Bo Diddley heard that and decided that was two chords too many.

When you've got a great riff, you don't need chord changes, not if you can just hammer on that riff.

So he came up with a variant of Dixon's song and called it I'm a Man.

In his version, there was only the one chord.

Willie Dixon Dixon guested on bass for that song, as it wasn't felt that Diddley's own bass player was getting the feeling right.

There were also some changes made to the song in the studio.

As Diddley put it later, they wanted me to spell man, but they weren't explaining it right.

They couldn't get me to spell man.

I didn't understand what they were talking about.

But eventually he did sing that man is spelled M A N, and the song went on to be covered by pretty much every British band of the sixties and become a blues standard.

The most important cover version of it, though, was when Muddy Waters decided to make his own answer record to Diddley, in which he stated that he was a man, not a boy like Diddley.

Diddley got a co-writing credit on this, though Willie Dixon, whose riff had been the basis of I'm a man, didn't spend.

I spell him

A-chai

in

that rubber than me

O-cha

Why

I spell manish boy

And then there was Netta James's answer record, W-O-M-A-N, which once again has Wild West references in it.

Now that should teach you about a W-O-I-M-H and holler.

Oh, oh, oh, oh,

oh, oh, oh, and holler, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

And that

inspired Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller to write this for Peggy Lee.

I can rub and scrub till this old house is shining like a dime.

Feed the baby, grease the car, and powder my face at the same time.

Get all dressed up, go out and swing till 4 a.m.

And then

Lay down at 5, jump up at 6 and start all over again.

Carla, I'm warming

a Win.

I'll say it again.

Of course, none of those records, except Muddy Waters's, gave Bo Diddley a writing credit, just as Diddley didn't credit Dixon for his riff.

At the same session as the single was recorded, Diddley's harmonica player, Billy Boy Boy Arnold, recorded a single of his own, backed by Diddley and his band.

I'm Sweet on You, Baby, wasn't released at the time, but it's a much more straightforward blues song, and more like Chess's normal releases.

Chess were interested in making more records with Arnold, but we'll see that that didn't turn out well.

I know a girl, she's just as sweet as she can be.

You know, she's only even

loving me.

But I'm sweet on you, baby.

Yes, I'm sweet on you, baby.

I'm sweet on you, baby.

You don't care nothing about me.

Despite putting out a truly phenomenal single, Diddley hit upon a real problem with his career, and one that would be one of the reasons he was never as popular as contemporaries like Chuck Berry.

The problem at first looked like anything but.

He was booked on the Ed Sullivan Show to promote his first single.

The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest TV show of the fifties and sixties.

A variety show presented by the eponymous Sullivan, who somehow, even after twenty years of presenting, never managed to look or sound remotely comfortable in front of a camera.

It was the programme that boosted Elvis Presley from stardom to superstardom,

Diddley liked the song enough that he would later record his own version of it.

And so he was singing it to himself in his dressing room.

One of the production staff happened to walk past and hear him and asked if he could perform that song on the show.

Diddley assumed he was being asked if he would do it as well as the song he was there to promote and was flattered to be asked to do a second song.

A couple of weeks ago, I went up in in Harlem.

I'd seen these shots in the newsreels about thousands of people jamming the streets around Frank Shiffman's Apollo Theatre, all trying to get in and see

Dr.

Jives,

rhythm and colour, rhythm and blue.

When he got out onto the stage, he saw the cue card saying Bo Diddley 16 Tons,

assumed it meant the song Bo Diddley, followed by the song 16 Tons,

and so he launched into Bo Diddley.

After all, why would he go on the show to promote someone else's record?

He was there to promote his own debut single, so of course he was going to play it.

This was not what the production person had intended, and was not what Ed Sullivan wanted.

Backstage there was a confrontation that got so heated that Diddley had to be physically restrained from beating Sullivan with his guitar, after Sullivan Sullivan called Diddley a black boy.

According to Diddley, black at that time and in that place was a racial slur, though it's the polite term to use today.

Sullivan yelled and screamed at Diddley and told him he would be blacklisted from network TV and would certainly never appear on Sullivan's show again under any circumstances.

After that first TV appearance, it would be seven years until Diddley's second.

And unlike all his contemporaries, he didn't even get to appear in films.

Even Alan Freed, who greatly respected Diddley and booked him on his live shows, and who Diddley also respected, didn't have him appear in any of the five rock and roll films he made.

As far as I can tell, the two minutes he was on the Ed Sullivan Show is the only record of Bo Diddle on film or video from fifty five through nineteen sixty two.

And this meant, as well, that Chess put all their promotional efforts behind Chuck Berry, who for all his faults was more welcome in the T V studios.

If Diddley wanted success, he had to let his records and live performances do the work for him, because he wasn't getting any help from the media.

Luckily, his records were great.

Not only was Diddley's first hit one of the great two-sided singles of all time, but his next single was also impressive.

The story of Diddley Daddy dates back to one of the white cover versions of Bo Diddley.

Essex Records put out this cover version by Gene Dinning, produced by Dave Miller, who had earlier produced Bill Haley and the Comet's first records.

And as with Georgia Gibbs's version of Tweedledee, the record label wanted to make the record sound as much like the original as possible, and so tried to get the original musicians to play on it, and made an agreement with chess.

They couldn't get Bo Diddley himself, and without his tremolo guitar it sounded nothing like the original.

But they did get Willie Dixon on bass, Diddley's drummer Clifton James, who, sadly, isn't the same Clifton James who played the bumbling sheriff in Live and Let Die and Superman Two, though it would be great if he was, and Billy Boy Arnold on Harmonica.

But Billy Boy Arnold made the mistake of going to Chess and asking for the money he was owed for the session.

Leonard Chess didn't like it when musicians wanted paying, and complained to Bo Diddley about Arnold.

Diddley told Arnold that chess wasn't happy with him, and so Arnold decided to take a song he'd written, Diddy Diddy Dum Dum, to another label rather than give it to Chess.

He changed the lyrics around a bit and called it, I Wish You Would.

Arnold actually recorded that for Vijay Records on the very day that Bo Diddley's second single was due to be recorded, and the Diddley session was held up because nobody knew where Arnold was.

They eventually found him and got him to Diddley's session, where Diddley started playing Diddy Diddy Dum Dum.

Leonard Chess suggested letting Arnold sing the song, but Arnold said, I can't.

I just recorded that for Vijay, and showed Chess the contract.

Diddley and Harvey Fouqua, who was there to sing backing vocals with the rest of the Moonglows, quickly reworked the song.

Arnold didn't want to play harmonica on something so close to a record he'd just made, though he played on the B-side.

and so Muddy Water's harmonica player Little Walter filled in instead.

The new song, entitled Diddley Daddy, became another of Diddley's signature songs.

I found her right here in the windy city.

Somebody kissed my baby last night.

My pretty baby crouching all right.

But the B side, She is fine, she is mine, was the one that would truly become influential.

Yeah, you don't love me, baby.

You don't love me, I know.

That song was later slightly reworked into this by Willie Cobbs.

You don't love me, yes, I know.

That song was covered by pretty much every white guitar band of the late sixties.

The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Alman Brothers, Steve Stills and Al Cooper.

The list goes on.

But Cobbs's song itself was also slightly reworked by Dawn Penn in 1967 and became a minor reggae classic.

Twenty-seven years later, in 1994, Penn re-recorded her song based on Cobbs's song, based on Bo Diddley's song, and it became a worldwide Smash hit, with Diddley getting co-writing credit.

You don't love me,

and I know now.

And that has later been covered by Beyoncé and Rihanna, and sampled by Ghostface Killer and Usher.

And that's how important Bo Diddley was at this point in time.

The B-side, to his less good follow-up to his debut, provided enough material for 60 years worth of hits in styles from RB to jam band to reggae to hip-hop.

And the song Bo Diddley itself, of course, would provide a rhythm for generations of musicians to take.

Everyone from Buddy Holly.

I wanna love you night and day.

You know my love will not fade away.

Oh, well, you know my love will not fade away.

To George Michael,

I guess it would be nice

if I could touch your body.

I know not everybody has got a body like you,

but I gotta think twice.

To you too.

Because that rhythm was so successful, even though most of the success went to white people who didn't credit or pay Diddley, people tend to think of Diddley as a one-ide musician, which is far from the truth.

Like many of his contemporaries, he only had a short period where he was truly inventive.

His last truly classic track was recorded in 1962, but that period was an astoundingly inventive one, and we're going to be seeing him again during the course of this series.

In his first four tracks, Diddley had managed to record three of the most influential tracks in rock history.

But the next time we look at him, it will be with a song he wrote for other people.

A song that would indirectly have massive effects on the whole of popular music.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is written, produced and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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