chapter3.md

"I used to box a little bit," says Bo, as he begins a front-yard oration to a couple of older grandsons and their friends on how to fight the then heavyweight champ, Evander Holyfield, whom he'd recently met.

"Holyfield's a wonderful guy, but once he's inside that ring the dude's nasty, ain't he! Heh, heh!"

"You see, with someone like Evander you gotta be fast, fast and able to keep it up. Hit and run. Bring in one of them alley-brick haymakers. Behind the ear, y'understand! If that didn't get your booty!"

Bo hunches down into a fighting stance. Though his boxing style appears more instinctive than schooled, he can still present a formidable image of power and determination. His right hand, cocked at the wrist, looks lethal with its massive show of whitening knuckle. His forearm and biceps are thick and bulging. When he shoots out blows in demonstration, they are crisp, direct, and powered by a sharp twist of the shoulders. There's an unnerving leer on his face. His strapping grandsons keep a giggly but wary distance.

"I fought under the name ëBo Diddley'--that was to intimidate my opponents, because ëBo' had that ring to it, like ëBoom Boom,' or ëBonecrusher!' With some cats the harder you hit ëem, the better they like it. I used to be like that. Cats would use my ear for a punching bag, y'understand. But if I ever caught ëem it was all over, ya dig? If I ever caught ëem, it . . . was . . . ALL . . . over!"

Taking a breather for awhile, Bo sits on his front steps, his feet resting on a concrete slab imprinted with the various initials and footprints of his youngest kin. He tells about his fighting days as a semi-pro during his late teens, how he used to hang out at Eddie Nickerson's Gym in Chicago, but "didn't train regular." In all, he recalls, he had twenty seven fights as a light heavyweight, including several bouts in the Chicago Golden Gloves contest. "I quit when the dudes started hitting me harder than I was hitting them. Hey, you don't see me messed up any, do you?"

"I first found out just how much I could take one day when I fell off the stoop," he says. "I was about thirteen then. This was when I was livin' in Chicago, messin' around."

"You know how kids will slide down those stone bannisters at the side of the steps without holding on, and then jump off onto the sidewalk? Well, I was doing that one day and fell and went headfirst into the concrete basement. The only thing I saw was a bunch of stars!"

"But right away I came up and got on my bike and went on down the street. And an old man settin' on the porch hollers after me, ëI don't believe it.' He says, ëKid, I thought you was dead!' So I said to myself, ëHey, I can take a lick and not even worry about it!'"

"Yeah, we'd been in Chicago about four years by then, I guess." * * *

As best can be determined, it was 1938 when Momma Gussie took Bo and her other children to Chicago. She was joining what proved to be one of the most extraordinary social phenomena of the time, the mass migration of rural southern Blacks to the cities of the north. Only Mississippi itself, the statistics show, had more Mississippi-born residents than Chicago, whose Black population--already well past the quarter million mark at that time--doubled within the next ten years.

Although Bo has no distinct recollection of the eighteen-hour journey, his mode of transportation was almost certainly the Illinois Central Railroad, whose famous trains, "The Creole," "The Louisiane," and "The Southern Express," could be boarded in Jackson, itself almost a day's connection from McComb. Their common destination was Chicago, Illinois, "that great iron city, that impersonal, mechanical city," as the novelist Richard Wright, another Mississippi-to-Chicago transplant, declared it.

Because it would take a while for Uncle Herbert in Chicago to muster the $15.25 per passenger fare, the McDaniels were obliged to travel in groups over several months apart. Willie and Lucille went first in May of that year, followed in September by Momma Gussie, her older daughter Freddie, and the nine year old Ellas.

Their new home was an apartment at 4746 Langley Avenue, on the city's South Side, just a few blocks from Washington Park to the south ("where I used to play, man") and Lake Michigan to the east. In the arcane phrasing of one housing study of the time, Chicago's South Side was a "Deteriorated Central Nonwhite Residential Area," in short, a black ghetto. But Langley Avenue was only one block from Cottage Grove Avenue which marked the ghetto's eastern edge, and being that close to the white areas, it was possible to find a few decent accommodations among the largely substandard housing. And Uncle Herbert, choosing well, had found one such oasis, a three-story brownstone equipped with the much sought-after luxury of central heating, the pipes of which were to serve as trapeze bars for Ellas and his friends. ("Stop swinging on the pipes, boys!" Bo recalls as one of Momma Gussie's most frequent admonitions).

Whatever the general condition of certain parts of the neighborhood when the McDaniels moved in, the main thoroughfares of the South Side could sometimes present an attractive picture, especially on a Sunday when the ladies could be seen dressed in neat frocks cut to mid-calf, and wearing short, square heels. Every woman wore a hat, and most men, too. The men invariably favored double-breasted suits--always buttoned, even on a summer's day. Model A cars, and the occasional model T, jammed the roadways.

At this stage of their family history, the McDaniels were what city planners used to call "in-migrants," an expression used to distinguish them from those coming from beyond the U.S. borders, but for Ellas this new world was so strange that he might as well have come from another planet, as from another state. Not long after his arrival, he saw snow for the first time, and he knew that his life had changed forever. "I thought it was sugar; white sugar all over the city!"

Momma Gussie laid down new rules, too. For one thing, because of the dangers and temptations in this new environment, Ellas had to be inside the house before it was dark. Without fail. "My momma had me so trained, boy, I could be playing on the sidewalk in the evening, and all of a sudden I'd get this thing to run upstairs, and when I got there I'd look out the window and see the street lights just comin' on!"

Around the corner on St. Lawrence Avenue at 49th Street was the Francis E. Willard school where Ellas got his first taste of urban education. As schools went in that section of town, Willard was a good school, its white principal having been cited in The Defender--Chicago's foremost black newspaper--for her concern with the "welfare and intellectual progress of the children of the community." But there was no escaping the fact that, in general, schools in the South Side were ill-served by the Chicago Board of Education, which until the time of Ellas's enrollment, had rejected all calls for Black representation on the Board. In 1939, however, white officialdom finally relented and admitted the Board's first black member, Dr. Midian O. Bonsfield. Of all the tasks this activist faced, the most difficult was to persuade the Board to eliminate the notorious overcrowding of South Side schools, and to abolish the clearly discriminatory "portable"--or prefabricated-- schools and half-day sessions, practices rare in white sections. But these were long-term problems. As a prospective student young Ellas had a more immediate agenda.

Bo recalled: "There was a sort of game that was run on black people during that time, which was that you couldn't go to school if you had a different name from your parents', even if they were fostering you. So I remember standing in a courtroom in front of this old judge when I was little, and raising my right hand-scared to death, y'know--and only faintly knowing the reason I had to change my name from Ellas Bates to Ellas Bates McDaniel."

As though one name change were not enough, it was at grammar school that Ellas picked up his famous moniker of "Bo," which for a few years shared mixed use with his other nicknames--"Hands" and "Bucket"--before becoming his permanent handle. But this was for friends only; to his immediate family he always remained Ellas. The "Diddley" bit came later.

"Understand, I never was a vicious person, or arrogant, but I was mischievous. I'd do things to make cats laugh in class and all that! But when it came to roughhousing and horseplay, I was about the nastiest sucker on the block, being that I had grown up on the farm and was a little bit stronger than the other kids. At first they used to call me ëHands!' ëCos I had this vice grip, where if I grabbed you, you couldn't get away."

"It was a girl started the whole Bo Diddley thing. This chick was real short, a stocky little thing, you know. She used to beat on me everyday like it was her job, sitting up there in the classroom. They used to say if girls do that to boys, they liked ëem. But I don't think that chick liked me the way she beat on me!"

"One of the things my mother used to tell me was, ëDon't be hittin' on the girls.' Only Momma didn't know that these girls could hurt you. I'd come home and there was big scratches on me from this chick, and my mamma would say:

ëYou've been fightin' girls, huh?'

ëNo, ma'am!'

ëYou're lyin'. What girl you been fightin' with?'

ëMomma, I ain't hittin' on girls!'

ëYou're lyin' boy. You been hittin' on some girl.' And she proceeds to beat up on me. I'm getting killed all kinda ways! And this girl was still workin' on my head--she about wore it out. I found out that I had to either outrun her, or scare her so much she'd never come around me again. So I went for her like a crazy animal this one time, and she tore off, man, yelling, ëYou're a Bo Diddley! You're a Bo Diddley!'"

"I wondered what the heck she was talking about, but she never messed with me again! So then all the kids started calling me ëBo'--for ëBoss,' you know. It was just a game, but it stuck!"

During World War II Bo engaged in the sort of miscellaneous money-making activities common to any savvy city kid who was beginning to realize the value of a dollar. Most of his enterprises were legitimate, but occasionally some were on the sneaky side. There were the times, for instance, when he used to filtch empty milk bottles off his neighbors' porches, using a bent coat hanger. "We could get two cents a bottle. Three bottles was six cents, and you could get a bar of candy for a nickel!" But it was not too long before his practical skills got him known as the local "fixit kid," enabling him to make good money mending washing machines and other household items. "ëThe key's under the mat, Ellas,' they'd say. And when old lady so-and-so had come back, I'd done tore up her washer, fixed it, and got it running again."

More significantly, he worked for a while as a bagger and stockboy at Roscoe Gaye's Grocery on 47th Street between Langley and Ebbetts, unaware as he toted the customers' bags that his future was waiting for him directly across the street at a popular rendezvous called the 708 Club, where, within less than ten years, he would be playing to packed houses in his early years as a popular local club musician.

While Bo was developing his skills as a budding entrepreneur, his mother, aided by Aunt Janie--both staunch church women and members of the BTU--were seeing to it that Bo's spiritual training was not neglected. This would not have been too difficult. Measured by the multitude of houses of worship, 1940's Chicago was then the nation's very bedrock of spirituality.

Bo was taken to the Ebenezer Baptist Church around the corner on Cottage Grove Avenue. As it turned out, he was happy with the arrangement: the church provided a vital link between his old life in the South and his new life in Chicago. Even more to the point, it was there that, through one of those life-altering strokes of serendipity, he fell under the influence of the man whom he now credits as the molder of his life in music. That was O. W. Frederick-- "Fess" to his friends, Professor by title, director of the church's music program, devoted teacher and guardian of what Bo characterized as "hard-headed dudes like me."

"Fess was a great man in my life," says Bo. "Being as I didn't have a father, he took me under his wing. And I thank God for him taking time with me, because my classical training has something to do with my being Bo Diddley. I don't believe I'd be foolin' with the guitar today but for that."

A distinguished-looking black man with greying hair who was always dressed in a three-piece suit and a dark tie, Professor Frederick left a firm impression on young Ellas when they first met. "I remember him telling my mother when he first saw me, ëMrs. McDaniel, I'm going to teach this boy. I know he's stubborn.'"

"And I'm looking at him and thinking, ëHow you know about me, man? You ain't never seen me before.'"

"He said, ëI'm gonna teach him. I know what he is.'"

"I'll never forget it: the first thing he asked my mother was what month was I born. And she said, ëWell, he was born in December.' And he says, ëDecember what?' And she told him the thirtieth. He says, ëAh-hah, he's stubborn; he's real stubborn!'"

"And he wasn't lying either. I was a real pistol!"

Under Professor Frederick's direction, Bo began to study the violin. He bought his first instrument at a secondhand store with money provided out of the weekly church collection. That instrument, a fifty-year-old Czechoslovakian model, saw heavy service. Like all the other novice players (including his classmate, Leroy Jenkins, who went on to make his fame in classical music and jazz), Bo dutifully attended the weekly classes conducted by Professor and Mrs. Frederick at the church, and then he would spend the rest of the week practicing at home.

The results were sometimes alarming. "When I started out learning to play the violin, I ran my neighbors nuts. And all the kitty-cats left the neighborhood," he claims wryly. "In fact, after a while I tried to get out from under the violin, but my mother says, ëOh no, you asked to play and you're gonna play.'"

"Well, I stuck at it--six years in all--and I even played the violin on a couple of my records. And the music we used to have to listen to and study has stayed with me, too. Some days I freak ëem all out at the house. I'll get into one of my classical moods and put on a record by one of those cats, like Beethoven or somebody, and everybody runs out of the house! ëDaddy's in one of his bags,' they say, and they don't come back in until they hear that record player go off!"

"I kept my original violin with me right up until 1987, when I gave it to the people at the Hard Rock CafÈ in Dallas."

Within a few years of commencing his musical training, however, Bo's attention turned from the violin to another instrument, an acoustical guitar that big sister Lucille had given him as a Christmas present. "I was about thirteen--something like that--and straight away that guitar just became me. Momma Gussie almost killed my sister about it, but that guitar was part of me from then on. Besides, I preferred it to the violin because it had more strings on it. It made more noise!"

Bo continued to play violin in the church orchestra and also made strides learning the trombone--this in anticipation of the upcoming church outing where all the local churches would gather at the celebration called the Baptist Congress. However, the guitar began to occupy more and more of his time. "Professor Frederick wasn't too happy when he found out I was playing guitar. I said, ëHey man, I'm still playing my stuff.' He said, ëYeah. . . but it's interfering!'"

"See, I got no encouragement in that direction: my family didn't encourage me; my teacher didn't encourage me. It's like my sister often says to people: ëEverything Bo accomplished on that guitar, he did himself.' And she oughta know; she's the one that bought it for me!"

"I was maybe in between fourteen and fifteen years old before I really started getting into something that sounded like a tune going. But the thing is, with me playing the violin it gave me an edge on being original. I played the guitar the same way, with the same licks and all, and this is where the Bo Diddley sound comes from--not the rhythm, mind you--but the sound."

"You see, man, it's really weird: when I started playing the guitar, beating and banging, I even had the police run me off my own porch. During that time in Chicago we had some of those officers who were what I call ësick in the head,' you know. I don't approve of it myself, but I can understand why people fall into calling officers certain names--it's because of the ignorance of a few cops, just a handful. So it was these types who ran me off my porch. I think the whole thing was that I was a youngster. I wasn't stealing anything from anybody, but I was black, and this was the thing they had: come through the neighborhood and scare all the black kids and this happened pretty often."

"So what is a kid to do? I said to myself, ëDang, if I could only get in some practice, me and my buddies could go out there on the street corners, but we can't go out until we learn a song or two, so the people'd want to hear us.' So me and my little group went out there with ONE song: ëThe Saints Go Marching In!' By then I had but two or three strings left on my guitar, and I went, ëOh when the saints... dah dah dah....' But I found out I could make money! People were putting money in the hat, and when we got back, me and "Sandman,"--this guy who sprinkled sand on a board and then danced on it--I said to him, ëDang, lookey here: all those nice coins. We got a thing goin' on here!' I found out how to put on some strings I bought, and all of a sudden--we started!"

Playing for change on the street corners, however, was not exactly what Momma Gussie had in mind for her son's future employment, and Bo took pains for a while to ensure that she didn't discover what he was up to. It was "Uncle Al," Lucius Allen, a neighbor on Langley Avenue, who broke the news to Momma Gussie. That day is etched sharply in Bo's memory.

"It was me, my pal Roosevelt, and Sandman out there one day. We dressed raggedy to go out on the street corners because people wouldn't give us anything if we were too dressed up. We were really beatin' and singin'. I mean, man, we was stomping out some news, and I was singing this song I made up called ëDirty Street Strutter,' and we were drawing quite a crowd. Then someone reaches way over out of the crowd and taps me on the shoulder. It was my Momma's friend, Uncle Al! He just pointed at me with his finger with a get-even look on his face. And then he disappeared."

"Do . . . you . . . know, that I ran through alleys, through gang-ways, down the middle of the street--I took every short cut that I ever knew to beat that man home. And . . . would . . . you . . . believe, when I got there he was settin' up in Momma's room already telling on me!"

"ëThere he is,' he says. I said, ëDang! How'd he beat me home? He was saying to her, ëYeah, he was up there on the street beatin' his guitar, him and two other dirty little dudes. Yeah, Aunt Gussie, he looked like he was up there b-b-begging!'"

For all Gussie's disapproval ("She called it the Devil's Music. I told her the devil never paid me a dime!"), Bo was making money on the streets. On a good day he might make as much as thirty dollars, which he split three ways with the others in the group, a pick-up trio that consisted at various times of Jody Williams, Raymond Scott, Billy Boy Arnold, Jerome Green, and Roosevelt Jackson, some of whom would later become key figures in Bo's musical life.

"We had a rule," says Bo. "If there wasn't enough money in the hat, we'd play another tune--until we hit a dollar. Then we'd move on to another corner. And whenever they started making requests we would put the hat back down and holler, ëFeed the kitty, feed the kitty.'"

"We didn't just sit around," he adds emphatically. "We worked."

Bo's success, however, did not escape the attention of local street gangs, who were quick to try and muscle in on his earnings. "All of this happened not too far from my house, but two or three blocks was another territory, you dig? If I was from Forty-Seventh Street and I went down to Forty-Third, I might lose a leg! I wrote a song about all that stuff, ëI'm Bad,' about being in the wrong neighborhood."

Bo took to carrying a knife for self-protection against "nasty dudes," but after one particularly noisy confrontation he was picked up by the police and sent before the judge. Only his native wit kept him from going to the Reformatory. "I told the judge I'd rather the police caught me with a weapon than for the hoods to catch me without one." The judge was apparently persuaded by this gritty logic; Bo was released with a warning, and went home with considerable relief. "I told my friends I went in there and came out a J.D., a Juvenile Delinquent!"

At home, further bad news awaited him. If the judge on this occasion had proved himself an understanding individual, the school authorities were far from pleased with Bo's failure to knuckle down at school. "I was the goofer-off in class, alright," admits Bo. "If you sat next to me, you never got any work done! Plus I wasn't too persuaded by what they were teaching me. The teacher would be talking about Africa and what life was like over there, and I'd be thinking, ëWhat good is this to me? I live in America! That's where I got to get me a job, not Africa!'"

Instead of graduating with the other kids to the local academic high school, the newly-named Du Sable High on nearby Pershing Road, Bo was to be transferred to Foster Vocational High School, way uptown. This two-year-old institution represented something of a landmark in Chicago education. It was named for Albon L. Foster, who had served as leader of the Chicago Urban League since the mid-1920's and who continued to be known widely as the advocate of "the spirit of interracial good" during what was proving to be a prolonged period of racial tension and turbulence in the city. The school that bore his name was one of his finest achievements, for Washburne, the largest and best equipped trade school in the city, was almost exclusively white, a fact bitterly assailed by blacks of the day. Thus the building of Foster Vocational High in 1941 was one of Chicago's first indications of a more even-handed treatment of black students. And it was completed just in time for Bo to take advantage of it.

Nowadays Bo can look back on his time at Foster with a sense of satisfaction, but at the time, going to vocational school seemed to him merely the lesser of two evils. "It was for kids who didn't want to study in regular school--and they gave me a choice: whether I wanted to be kicked out, or go to Foster. So I said, ëWhat the heck!' I was fifteen years old so I had to stay in school, and if I got kicked out the next shot was gonna be Reformatory. As it was, I was already runnin' with a crowd that wasn't going anywhere. The authorities gave me a little yellow slip of paper that I had to take home to my parents to have them sign, and that's how come I wound up at Foster."

"So I used to drive over there--fifteen years old and no license! We'd take the Dan Ryan Expressway, only we called it ëDirty Ryan'--it'd tear your car up, man, all those potholes and gas pipes, and stuff! If you fell in a pothole, they had to get a wrecker to get you out of there!"

"See, I went in there at Foster and learned all this auto mechanic stuff. And dig this: something else I learned was how to make guitars and violins! Earl Hooker was in that same class with me. Fact is, one of our assignments was to make a tub bass--a double bass, you know--and Earl made one of them things, and that dude first saw the light of day on one of the corners near Maxwell Street, when him and me played together!"

The location of Foster ("Seven-Twenty O'Brien Street," Bo rattles off, as though it were only yesterday rather than fifty-five years ago), meant not only was he within walking distance of the Loop, Chicago's downtown, but that he would be virtually next door to Maxwell Street, a place that in those days could quite literally be described as the crossroads of the blues. Maxwell Street was a thriving outdoor market covering several blocks in one of the oldest parts of town. Unheralded musicians arriving from the South would go there to showcase their talents for a Northern audience. The ability to attract a crowd was a certain pathway to bookings at lucrative house-parties or a means of hooking up with other promising musicians.

Bo was at Maxwell Street constantly. On weekends especially, he would make a careful reconnaissance of the blues players and juke maestros who frequented the market. One day he heard John Lee Hooker play his famous "Boogie Chillun," and this convinced him that he ought to try and break in on this lucrative turf himself in order to see if his "beatin' and bangin'" style would go over with the considerable audiences there. This could be a whole new departure, he figured.

But before that could happen, a sequence of events occurred that would very quickly divide him from the school, from the church, and from Momma Gussie, and that would cause him to seriously rethink his future. It began with what Bo has described as his "little teenage encounter with the law." He was about halfway between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays at the time.

Despite his intense interest in the street-scene, Bo had remained an active member of the church band, and with the annual trip again coming up, and his dues already paid out of his own pocket, Bo was looking forward to having some fun. Shortly before the day in question, however, he learned that because he had gone on the band trip in prior years he was being bumped from the outing in favor of a new player. Bo was outraged to think that he could be treated this way, and in retaliation he stole a half dozen of the band instruments, just enough "to mess up the whole trip," and hid them under his bed, "so nobody could go."

"I went back to church afterwards," says Bo. "I wasn't embarrassed by it. They encouraged me to come back to church. They understood that what I had done had a motive--I didn't call it criminal; it was that I felt like I was abused as a result of being a kid, a youngster. A young man that didn't have any voice. It was all, ëGet over, kid, and shut up.' But my money was like everybody else's money, and I wanted my money back that I had paid for the trip. There was one uniform left, and they gave it to this new kid. So I said, ëWell, if he's gonna go, I want my money back.' I ain't seen my money yet! Now, I don't like to see people getting misused just because someone figures to himself, ëI'm allowed to do this, and there ain't nothin' you can say about it.' Dig what I'm saying?"

"My mother was real cool about the whole thing. I told her somebody had taken the band instruments. She never let on, but she'd already figured it was me! All she said was, ëWell, that's a real shame, Ellas, ëcos when that person gets caught he'll probably go to jail.' And you know, she was dead right!"

Bo eventually "fessed up" to the deed and was arraigned at Juvenile Hall, only to have the misfortune to appear before the same judge as a year earlier. In keeping with the city's late-wartime policy of coming down hard on youthful offenders, Bo drew a stiff sentence: six months in the Cook County Jail and five years probation. "Twenty-Sixth and California: I never will forget it. But I did every day of my time, man, including the probation."

It's obvious that even after all these years, a sense of grievance about the affair still lingers for Bo, but he takes pride in having seen this difficult period through. "I paid my debt to society, and I went straight forward from there on," he says. "And I've never been back! I hope some young person who's been in trouble will maybe learn that you can straighten yourself out. It don't pay to be talking about revenge, ëcos usually you don't come out on the right end of it."

In jail Bo worked hard at his boxing skills--no shortage of takers there. He also had time to think about his music and to perfect some of the rhythm patterns that had always fascinated him. "That rest I had was productive. Resting the mind brings new thoughts; a confused mind brings nothing. After my period of confinement I came out there and wrote a song called ëUncle John,' and that was the song that eventually become ëBo Diddley' when I took it to Chess some years later."

"I was thinking in particular about the drumming; in fact, I wanted to be a drummer, but everytime I tried it the right hand never could understand what the left hand was doing, ya' dig? Up to then, I'd been working with Sandman, and the sound of that sand scrapin' on the board was like the sound of the brushes that a lot of drummers used back then. But I wanted something harder, with more of a beat to it, a different beat."

"So I worked on something I used to hear as a kid at the sanctified church--that's the Pentecostal Church as they call it--when I'd peep in over the windowsill. That's what my beat's based around in the first instance, that driving rhythm, and they'd keep it up for fifteen or twenty minutes in there. It's a rhythm that penetrates within the person."

"I used that first, and then some time later me and Clifton James worked at it some more, changed it around a little bit until we got the timing just so. I was the originator of that particular beat, but Clifton was the co-ordinator; I told him what I wanted, ëOn time, but out of step! Bumpety, bumpety, boom!' Since then I've put in all sorts of stuff: a little African, a little Calypso, and maybe I'll even put in some yodelling before I'm finished, ëcos I can do that too!"

When the date came for his release from the Cook County Jail, Bo decided not to return home. He knew that things were not likely to be as harmonious as before. Lucille, his step-sister had recently married and moved to an apartment across town, and Willie, his step-brother, had returned from the service weakened and unable to speak as a result of trauma suffered in combat during the war. As for himself, Bo was in no mood to tolerate further chastisement from Momma Gussie, either from her tongue or her hand. "She whupped me just for saying I wasn't gonna take whuppings no more," he says, with perhaps only a hint of exaggeration.

As soon as he got back to the neighborhood, Bo moved in with three older cousins--Geneva, LaVerne, and Louise--who lived right next door at 4744 Langley. He got his old job back at Gaye's Grocery as standby employment, and from that time on he was more or less self-supporting. He would see Momma Gussie from time to time, but music, the one thing that was of most interest to him, was of least interest to her.

"This rock ën' roll thing didn't set well with her at all; she didn't want me in it, didn't want no part of it, didn't want to hear it. It was just music, but with some Baptists if you breathe too hard, they think it's wrong! I guess that was part of the reason I left home."

"We were all proud of her, though. My momma went back to school to get her High School Equivalency," he says in a spirited voice. "I think she was trying to tell me, ëIf I can do it, then so can you.' But schooling was not for me, man."

"I guess it was about then, fresh out of jail, that I met Louise. She lived on the 4600 block of Ebbett's. We started hanging out, gettin' serious, you know. I didn't know what I was doing. Pretty soon Louise and me were married. Just eighteen, both of us! But as soon as our son Theodore was born she wanted to get out and have fun again. I thought I could keep a hand on her, tie her down, but she was fast! It didn't work for long, so we separated. But I still know where they're at. I call ëem up every now and then."

By the mid 1940's, Bo's interest in popular music had become a consuming passion. To hear the latest in black music in those days, you had only to turn on the radio or, if you were old enough, you might check out one of the numerous neighborhood night clubs.

A tempestuous club life had always been a Chicago trademark, even during the supposedly "dry" years of prohibition, but in the decade following repeal the foundation existed for an immense expansion of this prosperous network of dancing and drinking joints. It didn't seem to matter that many of them were illegal operations; it was all part of the upbeat, post-war mood.

In the black communities of the West Side and the South Side, the most musically active of these establishments were the spawning grounds of the modern blues, of which the reigning monarchs were such figures as Memphis Minnie ("Broken Heart"), Sonny Boy Williamson ("Suzie Q"), and Big Maceo ("Chicago Breakdown"). By the time Bo had reached his mid-teens, however, these celebrated performers were being surpassed by exponents of a more commercial form of their art, a music known as Rhythm and Blues. R & B, as it was soon called, was distinguishable from country blues by its sophisticated use of instrumentation, its amplification, and its steady, rocking beat. This new format was so popular that the sale of R & B recordings quickly became big business, especially now that the wartime rationing of Shellac (it had been needed for bomb casings) and the Petrillo ban on studio recording (a union attempt to put the jukebox out of business) had both been lifted. For the first time ever, it was now possible for contemporary black artists to be known on the basis of their recording fame alone, rather than from performances or local followings.

Bo was already long familiar with the genre's most successful performers from listening to them secretly on the radio ("We had to turn it off when Gussie came home!") He was taken with the rolling boogies of Louis Jordan--"What a unique musician"--and the mellow sounds of T-Bone Walker--"such a nice tone." But his greatest fascination was for Muddy Waters, a fellow sojourner from Mississippi, whose feverish "I Can't Be Satisfied" was creating a big stir on the Chicago music scene. One day Bo heard that Muddy would be playing at the popular Du Drop Inn at 3609 Wentworth, and though still underage he decided he would try and get a close look at this blues magus.

"I was a Muddy Waters fanatic, no doubt about it. But I wasn't trying to play like Muddy--nobody could play like that cat! I used to sneak into the Lounge down there on Wentworth, but they throwed my booty out into the street one night, out into the street car tracks! I wasn't old enough to be in there, and I was hidin' in the corner between this cigarette machine and the juke box. It was hot in that joint, too, but I figured I was cool. Then the bouncer, this GREAT big dude, looked like he was about seven feet tall, came in and kinda looked out of his right eye and saw me down there, like dirt, you know. ëCome here, you little sucker,' he says. I never will forget that ëcos I wanted to do something to him, see. He didn't have to throw me out on the streets like that. Ah-ha, ha, ha!"

'Cos I wanted to hear Muddy, man. I wanted to see Muddy walk through that place, and be lord of ëem all, you know. And when he got on that guitar, man, Muddy was a mean dude. And Otis Spann kicking on that piano when Muddy sang out, ëGot a boy child coming / Gonna be a son of a gun,' Wow! Look out!"

"I got just enough of an idea of what he was doing to know that I had to do something different to make it in that town. Besides, Muddy was a slide player, where I was principally a rhythm artist."

"I found my style in rhythm, you know. I just sat down and invented something; I never imagined it would develop as it did. I realized I had to find my own place in the music picture. It's like searching among full buckets and finding one empty. You jump in and do your thing there."

Never lacking in enterprise, Bo decided to try and bring his act off the streets and into the clubs. And there were plenty of places to choose from in his immediate neighborhood: sawdust joints like the Barrelhouse at 51st and Michigan, and Theresa's Lounge at 48th and Indiana (still going strong to this day), or Cadillac Baby's at 49th and Dearborn, a plush establishment where Bobby Saxton ("Trying to Make a Living") and Detroit Junior ("Money Tree") had made their debuts. All were only a stone's throw from home for Bo, but they were risky places for an essentially amateur musician to earn a living, especially when performing in front of the hard-drinking, permanently riotous crowd whose Monday morning appearances for brawling and breach of the peace helped earn the Fifth District Police Court at 48th and Wabash, the title of "the busiest police station in the world."

Nevertheless, following his brief relationship with Louise, Bo needed the money. He had gone through several jobs, first as an elevator operator (or "superiopifider" in Bo's coinage), then various kinds of factory work--all now just a blur in his memory--but nothing that had proved steady. He had even applied to join the military, but his draft status had proved unfavorable. "I was designated ëNot Suitable At This Time,'" says Bo, quickly adding, "Not ëNot Suitable Period,' but ëAt This Time.'"

Against these experiences, things certainly looked more promising on the music side. Besides, Bo now had a sidekick named Jerome Green, who was rapidly proving to be a dependable foil to his wit and a genuine contributor to his developing sound. And the Diddley combo had a name, The Langley Avenue Jivecats.

"About then," says Bo, "the Chicago music scene was strictly blues or boogie woogie. I lived through all that era; the zoot suit scene. Everything you wore had to be loud; I believe we'd cut a hole in a carpet and wear it! And ëjive' was the word then. Then a little bit later everybody had to be ëhip,' so I changed the name of my group from Jivecats to Hipcats, or Hipsters."

"Then along came Jerome. He was out of the jazz scene, playing a tuba or something bigger than he was. It was me who taught him how to shake maracas. Jerome couldn't carry a tune in a paper bag, but he sure learned how to shake those things! I coached him and coached him until we hit upon just the right sound: like a freight train coming through. Jerome wouldn't play on the street corners at first, ëcos he said it was begging, but wait till he saw the money falling in and he pretty soon changed his mind! ëYou gonna play that corner again, Bo'? he'd say. ëI'd say, ëYeah, man, you with us?' He'd say, ëI'm with you, Bo!' Heh, Heh!"

"So I thought we had it all together to get club dates. We were already playing some of those crazy house parties, but it was harder breaking into the club scene than I had thought it would be. First thing was I had to go and see my probation officer. See, I had to get permission to play in the clubs past midnight--up to twelve o'clock they would turn a blind eye, and the age of consent was 21 then, remember. Because I had never missed a single appointment with him, he said, ëSure, go ahead.' And then he said, ëI wish they were all like you, McDaniel.' That was real nice of him to say,--'cos he had some bad dudes let me tell ya--and him saying that stayed with me for a long time. He signed something that allowed me to get into a club without a hassle. But then you had another hassle trying to get the gig!"

"See, Muddy Waters was really coming on strong then--he had the town sewed up--and the first thing the club owner would say was, ëCan you play like Muddy Waters?' Or, they might ask if you could play like Little Walter or Howlin' Wolf, and if you couldn't play their numbers, then forget it. I got my chance because one of ëem was on the road one weekend and the owner needed somebody quick to come in and keep the people happy."

It was then that Bo learned that acoustic guitar was out and electric was in. This would require the development of a whole new area of expertise. "I wasn't in a position to buy an electric guitar when I played my first club date, so I had to try and make my own pickups if I was to get anywhere. I used old broken radios for parts and made me some Mickey Mouse nonsense, but that experience gave me an understanding of what went into an electric guitar and what you could do with it. After that I worked at it until I could hook one thing up with another and get all sorts of weird sounds. I'm famous for them noises, man."

Bo had often recalled those days of making the rounds of the rough, small clubs with his rhythm section, Jerome Green on maracas and Roosevelt Jackson on washtub-bass. "Man, we played some smoky holes," he told writer Michael Lydon, "bars under the el station, in storefront clubs, and it was hard, so hard you was looking for the worm to pull the robin into the ground, you dig? You ask cats like Muddy and Willie Dixon and J.B. Lenoir, you ask ëem how hard it was to get five dollars or six dollars together on a weekend. When you worked a club, you worked it. Sometimes I'd make less that I would on the street, because on the street they'd say, ëHow cute that boy is,' and put in fifty cents; but in a club you had to have it together or be cut."

Another time he told Edward Kiersh and a roomful of backstage celebrants, "You watched your ass in those days. You didn't monkey around because they had some bad dudes in my neighborhood, called the King Cole Trio and Two Gun Pete. These men were nuts; they hung around the 708 Club where I first started playing. Got old enough to work in this club and Pete come in there, beat on the door one night, and said, ëCome here boy, let me see some ID, go in your pocket slow.' They called him Two Gun Pete but he actually had three. Had a .32 back in a holster in the middle of his back, and one on each side of his body. If you took them two, you ain't done nothing, for this man would shoot you, real quick, guaranteed. Then there was Indian Joe; he used to throw bombs in store windows. Thank God I'm alive today."

Despite its obvious dangers, Bo enjoyed this period of his life, his time for paying his dues. As part of his club act he developed some of the dance moves that he would put over on the streets--part comic parody of tap or sand-dancing, part adolescent exhibitionism with sly leg wiggles and suggestive gyrations of the hips. His footwork was light and fast, a sort of rhythmic boxing that kept pace with the frenzied chording of his guitar. By his early twenties Bo's local celebrity was increasing. His routine had always been well received, but now it was getting a reputation for his downright sexual energy. It went over particularly well with young women, and it was this perhaps that most worried "Tootsie" McDaniel.

Tootsie, or Toots, was the former Ethel Mae Smith, a vivacious and resourceful woman whom Bo, not untypically making a nuisance of himself, had gotten to know one night by tugging her braids as he sat behind her in a local movie theatre. To Toots's credit, she, in turn, was to yank his crank more than once during the course of their uneven and often tempestuous fifteen-year marriage. "Speak to Tootsie," says Bo laconically today, "and she'll tell you how bad a person Bo Diddley is!"

Bo and Ethel had married in 1951, when he was 22 and she 20. Their daughter Tanya was born in 1952 and son Anthony in 1953, and although Bo took the idea of family seriously, Ethel had friends who often whispered in her ear that she should keep her man under firmer control. But Ethel hardly needed reminding of that; she herself was opposed to her husband's club playing and wanted to quell these stories circulating through the neighborhood of a rhythm and blues singer whose lyrics were often sexually explicit--not so shocking given the carousing and dating function of the meeting places in which they were sung--but who was also known to deliver an uninhibited, after-hours routine that left many a female admirer trembling in her shoes. Toots's strategy for keeping Bo off the stage was directed at what she considered the source of his attraction, his guitar.

"Toots didn't like me playing at all," laughs Bo. "She figured the only way to stop me was to break up my guitar! But we had to have some money coming in. Sometimes I'd have a day job and sometimes I wouldn't, and I'd be dragging my hind parts all over Chicago looking for work, and here I had a means of income right in my own hands."

"One time she and me got into it; we were really shucking and jiving, and you know what she did? She jumped on my guitar and then took a Pepsi-Cola bottle to it and trashed it to pieces--just bits of wood and strings dangling everywhere. I hate Pepsi today because of what it did to my guitar! If it hadn't have been for Momma Gussie coming along just then, I don't know what I'd have done to her. But my Momma says, ëDon't you touch that girl.' They were ganging up on me, that's what it was, and I said, ëWell, throw her out the window or something.' I ain't kiddin', I was so mad. I just sat down and cried over what she'd done to my guitar, and my momma was hollering, ëGo and get you a real job.'"

"I tell you, man, my old lady was mean. I woke up one night and she was foolin' with a switchblade. She was looking at me real hard and I think I know why. She was trying to figure out where to cut!"

Bo laid low for a while, giving up the leadership of his "little juke band" and making only occasional forays onto the scene. He endured the pressures at home, and found steady work driving heavy trucks for the A-1 Construction Company. However, the urge to play was irresistible, and by early 1954 he was working regularly again as a club entertainer, albeit under Toots's bright but watchful eye. By this time he was able to afford a new guitar, a Kay--his first fully electrified model--which he matched with a Fender Bassman amplifier.

The rhythm and blues clubs, too, were experiencing an upswing in attendance after the Korean war, and owners were urgently in need of fresh talent. There was a demand for new music and Bo Diddley was prepared to fill it. His first stand was at the Sawdust Trail. "The sawdust was so deep you never knew what you were steppin' in," he reminisces fondly. By October, 1954, he had opened at the bigger and hotter Castle Rock at 50th and Princeton, where his show proved so popular that it was extended throughout the winter.

There was little doubt he was on a roll. Bo Diddley was ready to rock, and he was not too far away from fame.