If you were going to Bo Diddley's place a year or so back, you would need a map, a lot of change to call along the way, and perhaps even a shovel. You head out east from Gainesville and drive towards the coast. Before long you encounter a Florida far removed from the brash cityscape of "Miami Vice" or the manicured dullness of Palm Beach. This is a Florida of softly undulating hills and gently curving roads where, as your car moves along the smooth pavement, you might catch a glimpse of Sunday School children picking roadside wildflowers or of bungalows and trailer homes set back from the road, surrounded by paddocks or shady groves of lush bright-green trees.
A good twenty miles out of town you need to turn off the highway at the quiet community of Parliament Palms. Here the road changes from blacktop to crushed stone and the dust starts to fly, but after a few more turns through the dry piney woods you come to Bo's place, or at least to the entrance to it. You're not quite there yet, and it's here in fact that your problems might really start and where that shovel might come in handy. You see, with the possible exception of a road left unplowed the morning after a snowstorm in Buffalo, New York, Bo Diddley's driveway is the most difficult driveway in the whole of North America. In this part of the country local knowledge has it that to build a solid road through virgin land, as Bo has done, you had better wait for a rainy day so that the naturally crumbly soil will bind together and pack down well. Bo's road, however, was evidently made when the soil was bone dry so that it consists of a deep layer of the finest, sugary sand you'll ever find on land or beach. Tough to drive on, it's nevertheless a good way to deter unwanted visitors.
This was the situation confronting the long-time fanó-now to serve as Bo's chronicleró-early one Easter Sunday as he drove up to Bo's entrance for the first of many interviews that would be conducted in many settings. Having been told on the phone to "keep that thing going at all costs," he accelerated his rented Toyota Tercel off the safety of the hardened gravel road and plunged into the uncertain depths of the sandlot driveway, whipping and bucking from side to side. Occasionally a plank or some other object buried in the sand popped up from the pressure of the passing wheels, and flew off into the thickets or clunked against the gas tank underneath.
The driver forced the car around the twists and bends through the woods; then, thankfully, he found himself on firmer ground and pulled into a village-like clearing, a park of double trailer homes, cars and machinery, and toys and wading pools. There was a white picket fence in front of the main home, defining a small area of lawn, and across from tható-standing alone for the present, but evidently what would become the entrance to a vegetable gardenó-was a delicately trellised rose arbor. A rototiller resting on its side marked the spot where the first rows were to be laid.
This was Bo Diddley's home, dubbed "Diddleyville" by one of Bo's resident wits, a place that had begun as a temporary arrangement as divorce lawyers haggled over the disposition of a fine home on the other side of Gainesville that Bo had shared until five or six years ago with his former wife, Kay. When the day arrived when all the legal dust had settled, Bo would be ready to break ground on a permanent home here.
Bo likes to get outdoors early when he is not on the road, and, sure enough, this morning he was already up and out, working at one of his favorite pastimes: auto repair, or in this instance, tractor repair. This was not that so much larger than life figure high above the crowd in Portland, Maine, but instead a definitely down-home Diddley dressed in a faded khaki T-shirt and loose fitting dungarees with a greasy rag and some wrenches in the back pockets. He had a wide brimmed Panama hat that, for the moment, was set on the seat of the tractor.
"This is my sanctuary, man, engines and stuff," he said, as he twisted to one side and stretched an arm and a shoulder deep into the metallic bowels of the tractor. "You gotta have a system," he continued, as he brought up the oily parts he was fixing and placed them in a line on a flat part of the hood. "Put ëem back in, in the reverse order they come out: simple as that!" he grinned. It was fascinating to observe his steady skill and quiet absorbtion as he went about his task humming to himself, and it was particularly difficult to believe that here was a man whose artistry made him one of the principal contributors to a music that has changed our culture. He looked more like a man who had spent all his life around farm machinery or in the inner recesses of a repair garage. But wasn't it Bo Diddley himself who once sang, "I look like a farmer, but I'm a lover / You cain't judge a book by lookin' at the cover"?
"Good thing you came this weekend," he said. "Most of my family's here this time of year." He nodded towards the house where, judging by the sounds of activity, things were starting to stir. Three casually-dressed young men came out of the house and approached the tractor. "Can you get it goin', Grandpaw?" asked the tallest of the three, a handsome youth whose speech reflected traces of his Chicago origins.
Bo responded with a muffled, "Um hum."
He tried the ignition of the tractor. The motor turned over but did not kick in. He pulled the choke out a bit, and on a second try the engine came to life. A little lid on top of the tractor's vertical exhaust started clapping and flapping erratically as though crowing the triumph of the engine's repair. Replacing his hat and hopping into the driver's seat, Bo gunned the motor a bit and then motioned to his grandson. "Hey, Mark," he hollered, "first thing tomorrow we gotta start work on that road. Fella here looked like he was all done in when he got out of his car! Heh, heh, heh, ha...!"
Bo Diddley, one of nature's great laughers, let go: waves of guffawing and giggling echoed around the homestead. Indeed, it was difficult to say which at that time was more responsible for disturbing the peace of the Florida countryside: the chugging explosions of the rejuvenated tractor or the happy spasms of Bo Diddley's remarkable laugh.
To claim that Bo runs an active household would be an understatement. Inside his open-plan Deluxe Nobility trailer home, on this particular day there was a constant movement of people, from outdoors to indoors, from bedrooms to bathrooms, from living room to kitchen, from kitchen to back porch. Music came from the competing sources of a television (the movie Ruth) and the radio (station Q-Zoo, Tampa); a half dozen small children ("wall-to-wall kids"-óhis grandchildren and great-grandchildren) were at play on the living room carpet, swapping stories of Easter egg coups; and there were people in the kitchen cooking or preparing to cook, eating or preparing to eat. In an oasis of tranquility, Pirate, his fiancÈe's black cató-lay across an air conditioning duct, literally the coolest cat in the house.
This is how Bo Diddley likes it: plenty of family and friends to affirm his usefulness to others; plenty of kids to watch over and to give love to and to get love from in return; plenty of men around to help out with the jobs and to keep a protective eye on things while he's on the road; plenty of family to do the things he doesn't have time for. Companionship and conversation, problems and projects, food, shelter, music, and loveó-these are the ingredients of Diddley's domestic life. And all to be provided by his own talent and his own hard work. A gigantic undertaking certainly, but one that Bo shoulders happily, as though he were simply living out the description of one of his earliest songs, "The Great Grandpappy," where he tells of all the children "who came to be blessed in that Great Man's house in the wilderness."
Bo sat calmly at the end of the long, ebony dining table, rather like the eye at the center of a hurricane, his hands wrapped around a big mug of coffee, while the activity swirled around him. "That coffee may taste funny," someone called out. "There was corn flakes in the coffee pot this morning!" The threat of adulteration didn't seem to bother Bo, who drank his coffee in eager gulps.
"I guess you can see what I've got in my house," he said to his visitor. "You see, I don't see color." It was true. Among the company you could distinguish black people, white people, amber people, and others of intermediate tones, reflections not just of the range of Bo's friendships but of his marriages, too. Bo introduced his rainbow coalition as they passed by the dining table on their various missions. All were unfailingly friendly, but the visitoró-who is a professional at memorizing names-ódecided at this stage to concentrate on the principals. There was Sylvia, his beautiful New Mexico-born fiancÈe; Tanya and Anthony, his grown children from his second marriage; Terri and Tammi, both in their twenties, his daughters from his third marriage; Ricky, his nephew; Scottie, his engineer and guitarist; Ronnie, his studio bass player; Joe, Joyce, and Dick, helpers and advisors; and on the back porch overlooking a quadrangle of grass and rose-beds were three special visitors here for the Easter holiday: Lucille, Bo's sister; Kenneth, his brother; and Momma Etheló-Mrs. Ethel Christopher-óthe woman who some sixty years earlier gave birth to the child later to be known as Bo Diddley.
Bo finished his coffee and offered a tour of the house. On one wall of the master bedroom, there was a life-size photo of a meaner, leaner Bo taken at a show in the early seventies. Overhead, in a graphic display of power tool art, he had decorated the broad support beams with slashing patterns cut with a circular saw. In the adjoining bathroom he pointed to the jacuzzi he had just installed. On shelves and niches in the living room were displayed samples of Bo's signed potteryódishes, bowls, and a "smokeless" ashtray-ómementos of the days when he and his former wife, Kay, the mother of those twenty-somethings Terri and Tammi, took up pottery together.
On a partition separating the kitchen and the living room, he pointed to what he called his "Wall of Fame," where he had hung some of the honors accumulated over the years of his life as an entertaineró-all the things, that is, that he has managed to save from the upheavals of periodic relocations from coast to coast, from split-ups with wives, and from the depredations of "sticky fingered dudes." In one especially ruinous instance, he recalled, a hurricane ripped off the roof of his house and destroyed pretty much his entire collection of professional memorabilia. "Worse than the rain was the sun; it bleached out all the photos by the time we came back," he lamented.
However, here hung his Gold Record from the Chess company for the million selling Gunslinger album: "I never even saw this until a fan sent it to me a few years agoó-it had been ripped off the wall in Phil Chess's office," said Bo ruefully. Also on display were an Award Certificate, signed by John Hammond from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (the forerunner of the "Grammies"), and a Thank You plaque from the Hard Rock CafÈ, Dallas, conferring Honorary Citizenship from that city. There were photos of himself with various artists, among them Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Grateful Dead, and Ron Wood, as well as a photo of B.B. King and Bo backstage on the night of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
There was also a series of formal-looking proclamations each of which declares such and such a date as "Bo Diddley Day" in various cities: Santa Fe, New Mexico; Providence, Rhode Island; and McComb, Mississippi. Bo corrected his visitor's pronunciation to make "McComb" rhyme with "Rome."
"You know where that is, don't ya? That's the place where I was born."
* * *
McComb, Mississippi, lies deep in the Cotton Belt, just a dozen or so miles from the Louisiana state line. Near there, in 1928, among the spectacular springtime bloom of azaleas and magnolias, Bo's mother, then Ethel Wilsonó-at the time of this visit the elderly lady talking contentedly with the family on the back porchó-fell in love with a young farm hand named Bubba Bates. Although the two were never married, when their baby was born at Ethel's sister's home on December 30 of that year, he was given the name Otha Ellas Bates. From the beginning Ellas rather than Otha was the name everyone preferred.
Ethel and the baby Ellas went to live in nearby Magnolia, Mississippi, where Ethel had grown up under the care of her first cousin, Gussie McDaniel. To a traveller in those daysó-in an era long before the Interstates-óMagnolia was just another dusty country town straddling Route 51 as it angled its increasingly subtropical path south to New Orleans. But for the infant Ellas, Magnolia was to be home for the next nine years. At that time the Great Depression was at its height, but for the Black population of Magnolia this fact mattered little, living essentially as they had for generations, and for generations before that, quite untouched by anything resembling prosperity.
Sitting now in the warm spring sunshine of Florida with her famous son beside her, Ethel recalled those early days. She told how life was hard for her and her baby and how she prayed nightly that her circumstances would improve. She didn't want riches, just enough to get by. So, she was very pleased, she remembered, at finding work in the home of a local family, but one day when he was only eight months old, her baby-ódisappeared.
"I had left him with another lady, to nurse him, and to look after him while I was working. I didn't ask my people to take him because I wanted to be independent. I was just a teenage mother, you see." She laughed coyly at this recollection of her youthful determination, then continued: "On Sunday after I went to work I told the folks there that I had a child. They said, ëWell you can bring him on the job with you,' and they would take me to get him. We went to fetch him, but he wasn't there! The lady I'd left him with said, ëGussie McDaniel came and got that baby.' Right then I went up to Gussie's house, and she said, ëWhat you take that baby there for?' She was mad that I hadn't left him with her instead!"
"And that was Bo's home from then on, right there with Momma Gussie, as he called her. I took him on the job with me sometimes, but usually I brought the baby to Gussie for her to raise, and we were both glad, ëcause Gussie had raised me from when I was three years old when my mother had died. I would be home to see him weekends, but they were just crazy about him. We were just a very loving family-óall cousins, really, but raised like sisters and brothers, which is how we've always thought of ourselves."
Thus Ellas Bates became a McDanieló-though at first only in spirit. It would be a while before a legal change of name was made. Becoming now a ward of Gussie and her husband Robert, Ellas was doubly provided for: he had two mothers, who would be known to him as Momma Ethel and Momma Gussie.
Willing though she was to continue her recollection of those days, Momma Ethel felt obliged to offer to help Sylvia in the kitchen, and she went indoors, only to find that one of the little ones, too small to catch the church bus that was just pulling away out front, wanted her immediate attention.
In her absence, Bo elaborated on his relationship with the mother who was compelled to give him up and the feelings she had held within her for nearly sixty years.
"All the time I was growing up my family never denied me knowledge of who my real mother was, and I've always had contact with her. I told my mother here the other dayó-and this was a big load off her shoulders-óëI don't ever want you to think I didn't understand why you let me be adopted out to your first cousin's,' I said, for the simple reason, and I've got sense enough to know it now, that during those times not everybody was fortunate to have food to put on the table."
"So, I told my mother, ëI didn't go too far. I only went to your first cousin's house, same as raised you!' And she says, ëDo you mean that?' And I said, ëI mean it, Momma.' She says ëI been wonderin' about that.'"
"Now, she's 80 years old and this has been bothering heró-that one event has bothered her all these years-ówondering what I thought about her. ëYou're Momma and nobody can take that away,' I said. ëAnd I love you.' I go to see her all the time in McCombó-that's just up the road here 642 miles!"
The infant Ellas had gone not only to an adoptive family that was related to him, but to a good and loving home as well. Robert and Gussie McDaniel had been married sixteen years when they took in Ellas; they also had three children of their own: Willie, 15, Freddie, 13, and Lucille, 11. In addition to raising their own children, they had also raised Bo's mother, Ethel, and Ethel's older brother and older sister, though these last three were now grown and on their own. Ellas, then, represented a third wave of McDaniel-raised kin.
Gussie and Robert McDaniel were extraordinary providers. Gussie, described by her daughter Lucille as attractive and ever smiling, was a deeply committed Baptist. Robert, robust and kindly, led the hard life of the crop farmer, working from dawn to night. Though the work was hard, the land provided, since Magnolia lay in that part of Mississippi known as the Hills, well clear of the Delta and the threat of springtime floods.
The McDaniel home was a typical, raised wooden house of perhaps four or five rooms, and a front porch. For a growing boy the principal advantage of such a place was the space around it. There was a long stretch of grass in front with a worn hardpan driveway, and to one side there was a cattle lot and a barn for chickens and hogs. Beyond that lay pastures and more cattle. On the other side was a cherry tree that Ellas and his young kin favored as a climbing post and which, Bo recalls, was the site of numerous falls.
In the meantime, Ethel had married a local man by the name of Haynes, and together they had a son, Kenneth, who was not only Bo's half-brother but also became his closest friend from childhood until the present. Kenneth Haynes, now the pastor of a successful church in Biloxi, Mississippi, took up the back-porch narration, as his brother listened intently.
"It was during our young days that Ellas and me were most often together. We'd play down at Momma Gussie's house. I'm not sure if the McDaniels owned it or whether they were tenants, but it was a wonderful place to grow up. We weren't too far from the church or the school. There was lots of prayer there, too. The whole family would go to church. That was the big thing ëcause you didn't go to town but once a month, so on Sundays the whole community would come together, all dressed up. I'm convinced that's where Ellas's music career began, right there in church.
"It was just a rural home," Kenneth continued, "but it was what I call under control; there were no harsh words between husband and wife-ójust kids getting into it, that's all."
"Yeah," said Bo in amused agreement, "I can see myself during that time, living in the country. It's like a movie runnin' in my mind: how I used to look, how I used to run up and down the dirt road. I was just like any other little black kid, you know, dirty and playing in the mud and getting whuppings and stuff for leaving the gates open for the cows to wander out!"
"I recall we had a horse-óa mule, that is-ónamed Shine. Later I wrote a song about her. Couldn't nobody ride Shine but me. We had a thing, y'know, this mule and me; she'd walk and follow me all around wherever I went. And I remember we had a cow named Liz. I used to sleep by her. Right by her head. That was my cow, and I'd go and crawl up by her neck and go to sleep. She would not move until someone came and got me away from her. She was protecting me I think; that's how farm animals are with kids."
It's clear that until he reached his early teens, Momma Gussie, who died in 1964, remained by far the single most important individual in Ellas's life. To hear Bo tell it, her principal activity appeared to have been keeping this naturally mischievous and inventive child under some semblance of control. For Ellas was driven by a bounding energy and an endless sense of curiosity that would often bring him into conflict with his high principled foster mother.
Nevertheless, while his body might have stung from some of the spankings he got, there were different tunes going on in Ellas's head. For there in rural Mississippi, even with relatively limited social contacts, a new musical synthesis began its unconscious gestation in Ellas's mind. Was it the result of some direct influence from a member of his family or his church, or some inherited characteristic? Not even Bo could say for sure.
"Some people say my music's close to Zydeco. Well, it's true: I belong to the Black race, but I also think of myself as a Black Frenchman, a Creole. I got cousins as light as you," he says, signalling to his visitor, "so I figure we got French blood in us somewhere. In the first place, New Orleans is full of ëem-óand McComb is very close to the Louisiana line. But there's nobody in my family, not even on my Daddy's side, so my Momma there says, that comes close to what I'm doing in music. I got that gene, I guess, because I've always been musical, but where it comes from no one can say!"
"Kenneth," he said, almost giggling. "Tell that story about setting down under a big ol' tree down there in Mississippi with me singing a song about a doodlebug. You know, Kenneth picked out that one thing that he remembers most of all about our childhood days when we lived in Magnolia."
Kenneth willingly took up the story, confirming how the awakening of Bo's musical talent was closely associated with play and fun, two elements that have always been present in Bo's music. "When Ellas and me got together, we always used to wander down the road to the gate by the pasture. That's where the doodlebugs lived! ëDoodlebug' is a little game that kids play with a worm that lives in a hole. You take some mud and put it on a straw and you stick the straw down the hole. After a while, when you see the straw move you jerk it out, and you'll find that worm, big as it is, hanging on!"
"We used to go down there and do that, and Ellas used to have a pair of old tin cups and a stick to act as a drum. And while I'm fishing out the worm, my brother would be beating on the cups with a stick. And that's the first time I heard that little rhythm of his: ëDa, da, dooh...dup, dup; da, da, dooh...dup, dup,' you know! And he'd be singing along with it: ëDoodlebug, doodlebug, where you been? Down in the pasture, fishin' again'."
"I told Bo about it recently. I said, ëDon't you remember?' And he said, ëYou gotta be kiddin'.' I was only four or five years old at the time, and so Ellas had to be about six or seven."
By the time Ellas was nine years old, he was growing fast. Tall for his age, he had a solid build which was especially apparent in his well developed shoulders and arms. For a country kid a good physique was a prized asset since physical labor was very much a part of the family routine, even for one so young. Yet Ellas was still the "baby" of the family, and with the only other boy, Willie, being ten years his senior, Ellas received the generous affections of his older girl cousins, among them his "big Sis," Lucille.
Sitting alongside her brothers at this Easter gathering, Lucille Fullerlove recalled Robert McDaniel's tireless efforts to provide for his family, of the toll that these efforts eventually took, and of Ellas's particular attachment to him. If there was a male figure on whom Ellas was to pattern his life, she suggested, then it was certainly that big-hearted man.
"When my father died in 1938 it was rough on all of us, but it made a particular impact on Ellas. They were pretty much inseparable: every move my father made, Ellas was right there. Everything my father did Ellas was there to help him do it. He was very, very devoted to my father. All the chores he would do on the farm, Ellas would do them right alongside. Ellas was happy to stay out of school so he could help do some of the work on the farm, if that's what my father wanted."
With the death of her husband and with four children, including Ellas to provide for, Gussie McDaniel had very few options before her. She decided she would take her children to live in Chicago. Ellas's uncle, Herbert Wilson-óhis mother's brotheró-had already found employment there. Ellas had to say goodbye to Momma Ethel who wanted to stay in Magnolia, both because of her fear of the big city and because of her husband's unwillingness to go north. But, Ellas left behind someone else who loved him, his brother Kenneth. Kenneth figured that this Chicago business had gotten completely out of hand and that before Ellas left for his new home he ought to be taught a lesson that he would never forget.
"I did not want him to go," picked up Kenneth. "Because he was leaving me. He was all I had-óour mother had married again, and my step sister was much older than me. The main thing I wanted to do was to have somebody to play with, and Ellas had always been that person. I didn't realize what the separation would bring. Living out in the country, it seemed to me Chicago was just up the road forty or fifty miles, instead of a thousand. I was pretty mad at him for leaving. I didn't think he cared any, so I jumped on him! Little Brotheró-that's me-ówasn't strong enough to hold him down, but I wanted to fight. I was really beating on him, but he just laughed at me! Finally, he just sat me down and told me: ëKenny, I got to go. It's not that I want to go, but I got to go.'"
Kenneth added softly: "It took me a long, long while to understand that."
The events of half a century ago were still burned freshly into their memories, and it proved to be a sobering moment for the two brothers. Bo decided to change the mood. Holding the screen door halfway open, he beckoned to his brother and to his sister to come on indoors, where everyone was gathering anyway and where Sylvia, assisted by a variety of aides, had been working for hours preparing the meal, while still managing to look immaculate. "I get ready like this just to go to the hardware store," she said gaily. You could sense that carnival air beginning to build that often precedes a big family feast. Bo was ready for fun, and everyone from the smallest--Bo has nine grandchildren and two great grandchildren--to the largest knew it.
"Come here, Tony," he called friskily to his son's son. "I'm gonna show you how Momma Gussie would straighten me out if I crossed that line, you know."
"Oh no!" said Tony, backing away thinking that the "demonstration" might be too realistic for comfort.
"That's all right," said Bo, reassuring his victim, "You'll survive. I did. In fact I admire her for the way she raised me." He looked over the top of his glasses in momentary seriousness. "It's worked, because I'm as straight as a die! But, man, she was strict."
Bo now had the nine year old Tony by the back of his pants, and it was the grandson's fate to have to await his "punishment" while Grandpaw launched into one of his comic family stories. Bo's audience of some twenty or so clan grabbed whatever seating they could and listened in.
"I never will forget this one time my other brother, Willie, and me got into trouble. This woman, named Tampa Harrington, used to live down the road from us at our place in Magnolia, and Momma Gussie had borrowed a shovel from her. She told me to take the shovel back to her. Now, Willie got hold of that shovel and he wasn't supposed to! Willie was about sixteen and a big kid and I'm far less than half his age. He's pullin' on the shovel and I'm pullin' on it too, trying to take it where Momma told me to go."
Bo moderated his delivery to a slow and dramatic style: "Momma. . . comes. . . out of the. . . house, sees us pullin' on the shovel and says to me: ëOh, your head's hard! I told you to take the shovel back.' Now Willie broke and ran!" (A chorus of "Uh Oh's" swelled from the assembly).
"I said, ëWell, Momma, Willie had hold of it,' but she started looking for a switch!" (Grabbed Tony again, who, a bag of giggles and squeals, he pretends to chastise). "I had on some little overalls--they used to call ëem britches--cut off above the knee and she started workin' on the calves of my legs." (Winces all around, amid the general hysterics, from the rest of the company).
"It was Bo Diddley-itis, that's what it was! I was jumpin'--me and that shovel, y'understand."
"So I broke and ran under the house, where Willie was already. Because I was short, all I had to do was stoop down just a little bit, and I could run around under there because I played there all the time. Momma tells Willie that he'd better catch me or he'd better not come out either!" (Widespread "Uh Oh's again, demonstrating a universal understanding of the situation by the audience).
"I got this big dude, Willie, chasing me under that house, and I'm jumpin' around between the concrete pillars there, and we had a real game goin' of hide-and-go-catch-me! Man, shoot! I heard me a Bam, Bam, Boom--that sucker's head was beat up when he came out from under there: all those nails stickin' through the floor! Momma Gussie was still hollering, ëYou get him!'"
"She whupped both of us. She'd say, ëYou're out of tune. I'm gonna have to tune you up.'"
"And when she started tuning, you'd be in 4-40, Baby!"
* * *
Bo and Kenneth had been talking things over. They'd like their mother to move from McComb and to live closer to one or the other of them. Bo had been preparing a long time for this moment. He'd already picked out a spot on his seventy or so acres that would make a great location for a new home for his mother. All he had to do, he explained to Kenneth, was to get the necessary permits and to improve the site. "I could cut a trail through the woods from her home to mine. We could call it Ethel Lane!" he beamed. "She could use the golf-cart to get around." Kenneth liked the sound of the plan and he and Bo hopped in the truck to go and inspect the new homesite and reach a decision.
Although Momma Ethel loved her Mississippi home and her friends and neighbors there, she would be the last to deny that she was getting on in years, and she agreed that it would be a joy to spend more time with her ever-growing body of descendants, especially the little ones. With black Pirate on her lap and a warm smile on her face, she settled back in her chair and told a friend about Bo's birthplace--McComb, Mississippi--both in the old days and in modern times.
She and Bo bear a remarkable resemblance to one another: "People say he looks like me. I think so too--lookin' in the mirror!" She spoke in soft whimsical tones, her voice rising at times to the light, animated manner of a young woman, at other times deepening into seriousness.
"One thing's for sure," she began, "we sure do change in life."
"Bo was probably about thirteen when he first came back to visit me from Chicago, and he came with a big guitar. Kenneth had a guitar too and he was tryin' to play! But Bo would be playing ëMr. Froggie Went A-Courting,' you know. It tickled me; I hadn't paid much attention to that song until I heard Bo playing it. And the next time I heard him playing--it was ëI'm A Man!'"
"That was around ë54 or ë55. I was working in a little cafe near McComb called Bumby's, and the boys would come out of New Orleans, and such in Louisiana, working their way through Mississippi, you know. And they would ask for a record and say, ëHey, How come you not got "Man" on this record machine?'"
"I said, ëWhat? "Man"? ëMan'--that's all they would say."
"So I said, ëWell, you tell me who sings it, and we'll try to get it.' And I asked the audiphone man--that's what we called the music man--to get it for us."
"Bo had already written me a letter and told me he'd made a record, but I'd forgotten! And when the music man came in, he put the record on, and he started dancing! It had to be really something to make the music man dance. And he sang, ëI'm a man...I made twenty-one...'"
"I said to him, ëWho's playin' that?' And another guy came up and he said, ëBO DIDDLEY!' and he was just a truck driver and had heard it."
"Oh, that's my son!' I hollered. "And nobody had ever heard me say that I had another son. So they all said, ëYou kiddin'--Your son?!' I said, ëYes, my son.' The lady I was working for says, ëWhere did you get a son come to be playin' a big ol' record?' So I said, ëWell he's my son,' and from then on they just had to believe me!'
"I liked his music because in those days I was kind of a dancer myself. But I never did imagine he'd be a great musician. In those days you never thought about it, about getting in the spotlight, or the limelight as we called it. Or being something. I always wanted to be something like that myself, but to do it I'd have to leave and go to Chicago, like Bessie Smith and Sarah Vaughan and all those ladies back then had to. And I'd ask myself, ëWould I have to put up with the big city to get all of that?'"
"But you see how it's boiled down. It's all around; it's accepted. I didn't think he'd be accepted, and I was a little afraid for Bo when he made his first trips here; I thought the crowd might pick at him. If you can take it, you stay, but it's difficult with the temperament that some of us have to take it. But. . . you learned how to take life."
Momma Ethel paused a while. She got up to go and turn down a television set that had been left on. Then with a barely contained enthusiasm, she resumed her story, focusing this time on the events of January l2, 1988, when the City of McComb, Mississippi, conferred upon her son the status of Honorary Citizen. In return, Bo climaxed the ceremony with a free concert, broadcast citywide, that included an extensive interview by local station WAPE.
Momma Ethel continued, "Yes, I had the one son, Kenneth, who became a minister, and the other one, Ellas who turned out to be a rock and roller. Between the two of them they sure gave me something to choose from!"
"I felt very proud for Bo to see him honored that day because he's been neglected in his rating for so long."
"Kenneth was there. He wanted to be there with his brother. And Bo was so proud having his brother there with him. I know Bo had been wonderin' about everything with Kenneth's being a minister, whether he would come or not and recognize him for his music. But we've always been there for one another, and with Bo a little bit of him is always with the Lord."
"And there were others from the church there, too. Usually the church people have some funny ideas about going to see something like a rock and roll show, but the people there called me all during the next day and told me they were there, in the audience, you know. And I know they were there because they were tellin' me how I acted! To tell you the truth they had me up there doin' something. People told me I was so graceful swaying and clapping to Bo's music!"
"At that time, when they honored him, I wasn't just sure how to act, but they were all so nice to me. One lady, a white lady, had called me. We hadn't met, but we talked on the phone about the concert night. And I said, ëHow'm I going to know you?' and she said, ëYou going to the concert?' and I said, ëYes, ma'am,' and she said, ëThat's all right, I'll find you.'"
"And sure enough, when I went up on the stage and turned around here came a white lady with her arms all stretched out. She just came running to me with her arms stretched out, and I just opened my arms and we hugged right there."
Nightfall was coming to the McDaniel property. A long, low, pink paintstroke of a sunset was grazing the top of the pines to the west. A pair of headlights could be seen coming down the drive, dodging and bucking and flashing darts of light into the woods. It was Bo and Kenneth back from their survey of the homesite that Bo had picked out for Momma Ethel. It was all settled; they were going to suggest that she come and live in Florida where the winters would be a little drier than in Mississippi and where Bo and Sylvia, and all of the grandkids, would be able to keep an eye on her.
Would that mean that Bo's connection with McComb would come to an end? "Take a look at that thing on the wall, brother," said Bo. "Maybe one day I could turn my old house there into a museum, or somethin' or the other."
His visitor paused on his way out to the front where he would get in his car and drive back to town for the night. He carefully read again the words inscribed on the black-framed parchment on the wall. Office of the Mayor
McComb, Mississippi
PROCLAMATION
BO DIDDLEY
WHEREAS, through your immense talents both as a musician and as a person, you have become a good-will ambassador honored and respected throughout the world;
WHEREAS, you always maintained close ties with family and friends here, and have no secret of your affection for McComb and your pride in the progress that has been achieved in this community.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Mayor and Board of Selectmen declare Bo Diddley an Honorary citizen and Ambassador for the City of McComb, Mississippi, and he is entitled to all rights, privileges, and honors pertaining thereto.
Yes, Bo would be going back home, to McComb.