"I think I first saw Bo in person," says Kay McDaniel, "when I was about sixteen or seventeen: 1957 or 1958, I'm not sure. I drove to Birmingham, Alabama, and saw a concert he was in, and kinda made up my mind right at that moment that I was gonna go to bed with him!" "There was something about the way he approached the stage, the way he turned and looked at you like, ëThis is my stage. I'm in command. you wait. . . !' I found something sexy about that. And there's something very provocative about his rhythm, something very basic, that disturbs you in places you aren't supposed to feel music. It's a real turn on."
"At that Birmingham concert, for example, some girl jumped out of the balcony--must have been on a death-trip, or something--but someone caught her by her feet. It was amazing: she probably would have killed someone on the ground if she'd made it."
Kay McDaniel, the former Kay Reynolds, brings forth these recollections as she sits by the pool of her condo in Woodland Hills, California. Behind her in the distance rise the round, brown shapes of the Santa Monica Mountains. It is a rare, clear-skied day in the Los Angeles area. Everything would be peaceful except that raucous blue jays scream in the acacias and dart from tree to tree.
Kay smokes non-stop, puffing incessantly and occasionally removing a fragment of tobacco from her tongue. If you had guessed from her forthright manner that she had spent much of her time around horses and horsey people you wouldn't be far wrong: horses, dogs, daughters, and Diddley have preoccupied her for the greater part of her adult life. To meet Kay McDaniel is to meet a woman obviously strong, both physically and emotionally. But today Kay is nervous and a little bit weepy. She hadn't wanted to be interviewed, and there is every reason why that should be so. She was married to Bo Diddley for twenty years, lived with him for five years before that--a quarter of a century together--but she and Bo were divorced some years ago. Even now the sting of that divorce is still with her, and she is struggling to find new strengths within herself. Though Kay McDaniel is passing through a painful intersection in her life, a friend has persuaded her that it might be a good idea to get her side of life with Bo Diddley on the record, so she is here today, slightly wary but by no means unfriendly.
As she gets more and more into the conversation, Kay's agitation lessens, and she seems to gain reassurance in talking about some of her achievements as the longtime wife and business partner of Bo Diddley, and of the years they spent together creating and raising what she and Bo cutely called the "Bokay race," their two daughters, Terri Lynne and Tammi Deanne McDaniel. In marriage Kay McDaniel gave much to Bo Diddley, and through him, to his fans, who, for that reason alone, at least should know about her.
"My contribution to his music was probably that I gave him the freedom to do what he wanted to do," she says, in an assertive yet fragile voice that bears a close resemblance to the speaking tones of the late country-rock star, Janis Joplin. "I gave him the freedom by watching his house. I was a house-sitter and entourage-watcher. But Bo had a great deal of resentment about me being in the music business at all. He needed his wife to be someone who was totally separate from the business--for his own reasons that I haven't figured out yet. I was too involved for his tastes."
"Musically, I sat with him. I was the one genuine critic. I could tell when he was performing well and when he wasn't, and other people would come up and ooh and aah, and I knew that he had not tried. I believe that if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right, and that's where Bo and me had our differences."
"It's very difficult to capture Bo's talent on a record because he is a live performer. It's eighty per cent performance with him, and he either gives one of the best performances in the world or one of the worst! And there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot in between. And it pisses me off when he doesn't do it right. Because that's nobody but him. I think he is one of the great musical talents of the century--the most exciting entertainer I've seen. What is truly criminal, and has a lot to do with our relationship--me not being the ëyes' wife he needed, and the ëstupid' wife he needed--is that God gave him the talent, and it is a sin not to use that talent to its fullest extent. I know he doesn't."
"I've heard him write things that were way out of their time, and he would not give them up to the record company because he wanted one hundred per cent for himself, instead of sharing his best material with the world. And I'm probably the only one who has ever heard them. He's sat on things for ever; he's probably forgotten about them. I've heard things in the middle of the night, in the recording studio--incredible stuff--and I hear the shit that he puts out now, and I have to say that comparatively speaking that's what it is!"
"He made this wonderful tape about me while he was on the road about how he loved me. And I listened and listened to that thing and I thought about it, and I asked him if he meant the things he said. And he thought a minute and said, 'Everything I have is yours, baby.' And I said ëDoes that include your talent?' And it would've been so fine; we could've gone into the recording studio right at that moment. But no, he never would go in and do the war service, the hard work. The songs he put out a while back on New Rose [Ain't It Good to Be Free], the last things we did as a team, are not a finished product. And my name's on it as a producer and that hurts me. This was half an album, and I went back and picked up some stuff he did in ë74 with Peggy Malone, and put it on the other side. The A side probably represents the best of his work at that point, and he never would go in and do the finish work. These are the rough takes. He issued a half-done job, and it was at that point that our relationship started falling apart."
At that moment the back door opens and Terri, Kay and Bo's eldest daughter, a statuesque goddess in her mid-twenties, walks by. She has evidently heard the final words of Kay's last sentence. "We all have different opinions of what happened," says Terri stiffly as she passes, referring to the split between her parents. Her remark reveals a clearly adversarial position. When it came, the divorce took the whole family with it: Tammi, the other daughter, moved away with Kay, while Terri (here on a brief visit to L.A.) stayed with her father in Florida. The battle lines continue to show signs of entrenchment. But Kay refuses to be trampled. "She has her outlook on what happened. I have mine," she says with a long-suffering look, and sufficient volume for Terri to hear. "She's entitled to have her own opinions and fantasies as I'm entitled to mine, I guess."
A long silence follows. For a while a plane drones overhead. There is a constant muffled roar coming up from the traffic that races through the canyon below. For a moment Kay seems to sink back into these sounds. At the same time, however, she manages to keep a half eye on Jansen, her grandchild, Terri's boy, who is playing on the swingset nearby.
Jansen is an exceptionally beautiful child and friendly to a tee. He'll sit on your lap and show you G.I. Joe or ask you to come and color with him. Doting grandfather Bo wrote a song about him in the Calypso style: it tells of Jansen bringing a bug into the house, a "spacebug," and Terri flipping her lid when she discovers that the bug's a roach. "Get that Sucker out of the house right now," she hollers. "But it's mine," Bo sings, imitating Jansen's pout, "Oh, Mommy, please Mommy, can I keep it?" It's characteristic of Bo, making art out of such mundane domestic dramas, but the song exasperated Bo's manager of that time, the late Marty Otelsberg. "How can I go to MCA and tell them that Bo's written a song about a cock-a-roach?" he'd exclaim in his best Brooklyn street-kid fashion, raising his hands and shoulders in a forlorn shrug. Rolling Stone Ron Wood, however, who heard the song on a daily basis as he and Bo toured Japan together, pronounced it, "Brilliant! Simply brilliant!"
As the controversy continues to rage, even as host Jack Perkins introduces the number to a national TV audience on "Arts and Entertainment Review," Jansen, the inspiration for "It's Mine," swings on, happy and oblivious, in the dry California light. "Jansen, watch out for those chains," calls Kay, who by now seems ready to resume her story, to tell about herself when she was Kay Reynolds, of her youthful interest in a singer named Bo Diddley, and how she eventually met and married him. For a while she sets aside further recriminations.
"I'm from the white aristocracy of the South," she says with increasing brightness, "born in Albany, Georgia, a direct descendant of Jefferson Davis; only child, only grandchild, silver spoon in my mouth." Then archly: "I got people still turning over in their grave because I married a black man!
"I went to school for one year, Florida State University, and I decided I wanted to run the world and I thought I knew how to do that, and I did! But I didn't have any credentials. So I went to Atlanta and worked in a dress shop, and I said, ëWhoa, this isn't happening.' Then I went to business school, and while I was there I scored a job as an executive secretary for the Gulf Life Insurance Company, and I couldn't even take shorthand yet! When the guy figured out that I answered letters better than he did, he kept me on, and I never finished business school. I did that for about a year and a half, until I became a Bo Diddley groupie!
"Then I went on the road selling magazines door to door, so that I could follow Bo around, and I was the top agent for Certain Union Circulation Company in Atlanta for about eight months. That's when I met Bo, at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., in February 1960. I was about twenty-one years old. My friends had been saying, ëStay away from Bo Diddley; he's the worst!' But I ignored them and walked back to his dressing room, and he's sitting there like King Tut on his throne. He warned me that if I wanted to go out with him I had to know he had a wife and two kids, and that I'd better be back there by 10:00 p.m. the next day. I told him I could make it. I thought I would be wined and dined: I spent my first date with Bo Diddley nailing insulation tiles to the wall of his recording studio!"
Bo, too, has distinct recollections about the time he first met Kay, and right from the beginning he was convinced that they would end up together. "When Kay turned up, I was separated from Tan and Anthony's mother. Toots had me on a peace bond at the time, and I knew our days were numbered as a couple. But I knew that Kay was following me, and through the South and all, and one day she saunters into the theatre where I was playing. She was selling books with her friend Anne McTaghert. She tried to sell me magazines. I think I bought about seventy-five dollars' worth, and I ain't paid for ëem yet!
"At first, for me, it was playing games, only to find out that the woman was serious! She wasn't after playin'. So one thing led to another and we ended up marrying. Being Caucasian and from Albany, Georgia, and finding me and then hanging out with me, I said to myself that if this woman got that kind of balls to hang out with me when we both might get tarred and feathered, that that is the woman I wanna marry. It might have been a shock to her when I proposed to her, but she was looking for some place to be also."
Bo wrote a song at the time called "Look at my Baby." He tells cockily of a girl who constantly makes eyes at him, who dances for him "in the middle of the floor" and who watches "every place I go." But the song remained unreleased until its inclusion in MCA's 1990 double-CD Bo Diddley retrospective. "Look at my Baby" was Bo's musical love letter to Kay, a token of the tender impressions she left upon him. By perverse chance, it was a letter that went undelivered for thirty years.
Today, it is Kay's constancy that he remembers best. "Kay proved to be a heck of a woman. She stuck with me when I was hit with the paternity suits and all that bullshit. In fact, she helped me pay some of my child support to Tootsie, for Tan and Anthony, when I was sick and couldn't work. She'd get money from her Mom, or something like that, just to keep my booty outta jail. She didn't come from a Nobody's family, she was a Somebody, you better believe it!"
Kay's first "date" with Bo was to provide her with a foretaste of her subsequent involvement with him. From the very beginning of their long relationship she was plunged into the role of key advisor and assistant, answering Bo's fan mail, dealing with the Chesses, and mastering the technical side of the music business. In short order, she schooled herself in the intricacies of the studio equipment, and became a competent recording engineer. Within a few months of their first meeting, Kay was in fact to make one particularly impressive contribution to Bo's work that to this day is little known or recognized among rock ën' roll aficionados.
"My name doesn't appear on the one thing that I'm most proud of, and that was the Gunslinger album," she says. "I did that on a little two-track Presto Machine at our house on Rhode Island Avenue, in Washington, D.C. It was entirely live, and Chess Records put it out exactly the way I recorded it. It went Gold, and I never got any credit. I was the engineer for that--there were no overdubs, no splicing. It was probably his best album of all, even though he had some non-singing girls backing him up that he insisted on--they could not carry a tune in a bucket. So getting that out on tape was truly amazing in itself."
Following Kay's arrival on the scene, that hot, little studio in D.C. saw plenty of action over the next five years. With Kay's help, Bo produced in whole or in part no fewer than seven albums there, but of all of these there is, as Kay suggests, little doubt that Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger (Checker LP 2977) stands as the most commercially successful and the most innovative.
With songs like "Gunslinger," "Cheyenne," "Whoa, Mule," and an arrangement of Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons," the 1960 Gunslinger was Bo's first "theme" album, though Chess had somewhat undermined its thematic integrity by releasing some of his other Western refrains on In the Spotlight, his preceding album. The idea of grouping songs around a particular theme was itself a concept pioneered by Bo, and was not picked up again, at least in rock circles, until Chubby Checker's series of LPs on the theme of the Twist for Cameo-Parkway. The subsequent development of the rock album, especially during its years of exponential growth in the sixties, owes much to the way in which Bo Diddley conceived the Gunslinger album.
Bo's inspiration for the title song was the movie, The Magnificent Seven, which in turn had drawn its inspiration from the ancient Japanese tale of the Seven Samurai, as depicted in Kurosawa's famous film of that name. The common thread in all these works of art--songs and film alike--was badness, machismo, authority, "coolth." The album's ultra hip cover photo depicting Bo in natty gunslinger garb, crouching forward ready to draw at the slightest provocation with the Cadillac guitar arranged at his feet like a long gun, announces firmly and emphatically that Bo Diddley "didn't take no messin'" and that in his hands the guitar was now a lethal weapon.
The opening chords of "Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger," hammered out at a pulsating, jog-trot clip and backed heavily by Jerome Green's maracas, create a distant, echoey effect, the perfect backdrop upon which the singer can paint the story that he "really wanna tell/About Bo Diddley at the OK Coral."
With "a gun on his hip and a rose on his chest," Bo Diddley's gunslinger incorporates the best of outlaw and lover. The streets empty at his approach and the sheriff quakes. Though the girls in the background sigh "Yeah-eh, Uh-huh," in sumptuous agreement, that is, sadly, as far as the story goes. In one of the biggest disasters for the Diddley discography, the people at Chess faded out the greater portion of the song so that there remains only a fragment, a mere one minute and fifty-four truncated seconds, of what was potentially a masterpiece of satiric wit and self mythologizing. Although live renditions hint at a fuller story--"They ambushed Bo at the edge of town/You oughta seen Diddley layin' ëem down!"--in none of the reissues of the original song has a longer version ever appeared: a great loss.
Yet there was one unlikely spin-off. "It tastes too good to let go," Bo sometimes says when he gets hold of a riff he likes. He must have felt that way about "Gunslinger" because the following year, 1961, he recorded that same riff in a peppier, instrumental-only version, characteristically playing both lead and rhythm at the same time, and producing riveting, exceptionally pure, banjo-like tones. He called this splendid version "Quickdraw."
In addition to the Western theme songs, the Gunslinger album contains two rip-roaring songs about cars, another rock ën' roll fad. The first was "Cadillac," while the other was the monumental "Ride On, Josephine." Few numbers he recorded ever approached the latter in demonstrating Bo's achievement as the comic laureate of rock and roll, or the ease and control he had over the vernacular music he had invented. In "Ride On, Josephine" Bo's voice has reached a zenith of richness and clarity. He laughs uproariously in meter. He conducts an ongoing banter with Josephine, the girl who tries to palm her "hot rod Ford," now leaking gas, onto an astonished used car dealer. But there is no voice of Josephine on the record; Bo conveys her presence by repeating everything she supposedly says in the form of a direct question, and then giving his answer with delicious hesitation:
What's that? you say, What kinda car I'm driving? I'm driving a ë48 Cadillac with Thunderbird wings, Tellin' you, baby, it's a runnin' thing. I can reach the shift and get up in gear, I can really take it a-way from here!
A bubbling rhetorical stammer follows--some of the funniest seconds of Bo on vinyl--as now a roadrunner on wheels, he mocks the girl and bids her goodbye. When George Thorogood covered the song on a 1987 album, he wisely passed over any attempt at too exact an imitation of Bo's unique verbal mannerisms and opted instead for an extended, skillful, guitar solo in the Bo Diddley style. When it comes to humor, the only wise course is to let Diddley be Diddley.
It would have been well for Bo if the D.C. police could have shared his happy-go-lucky attitude. However, at that time the D.C. police department was virtually all white, and there was undisguised resentment in this Southern town over the fact that a black rock star had taken a white wife. Harassment of Bo and Kay occurred on and off throughout their five years there, eventually being the chief reason for their moving first to Chicago--which didn't work out either--and then to Los Angeles. Nevertheless, at first Bo was determined that he would see it through.
"We knew we were unjustly being hassled. If we were in the streets, the cops would be staring at us, following us closely. Sure, I was hugging her. Nothin' wrong with that. That was my wife I was hugging. You got people, black and white, who'll look at you funny! Which I think is stupid. The only way I should be gazed upon is if I'm hugging an elephant! Then I'm really strange!
"I don't think anybody should have the right to tell you who you should love. Some people like Buicks, some people like Cadillacs, and some like Volkswagens; and some you cain't give ëem a Volkswagen, but you can give ëem a broken-down, old Chevrolet, you dig, heh, heh! So the sooner people should leave us alone."
At first there were also qualms within Bo's own family. Says Kenneth Haynes, Bo's brother, "The first time I heard Bo and Kay were seeing each other, I said, ëSTAY UP THERE [in the North]!' I had just seen my brother's life snapped out! So I go up there to see them, and for a while I was very uncomfortable, but Kay was just as sweet as could be. Here I was and she'd say, ëCome on, Kenneth, sit with me,' or ëLet's go such and such a place.' And I'd say, "Me and you?' See, I was thinking like any black man would from Mississippi in those days; no one went anywhere with a white woman. It was all, ëHow are you, Mizz Anne? How you doin', Mizz Anne?' But here I am walking down the roadway, and Kay's beautiful and tall and stepping high and talking. But I'm not talkin much; I'm just looking around me with both of my eyes! But Kay made me so comfortable. I believe I had more prejudice in my own heart at that time than she did.
"After that experience I knew the sort of exceptional person she was. She was wonderful: reared in the country, out on the farm, and that's the sort of person she was. She sent me four hundred dollars to repossess my car--she never asked Bo--her own money, Lord bless me! Six years later I walked in the door to pay her back. She wouldn't take it! Bo said, ëKay sent you that money; then you gotta give it to her, not me.' I said, ëYou ain't treatin' me fair: I wanna get this off my conscience.' He said, ëThen get it off, and keep the money!'"
Outside of his family life, Bo knew that things remained seriously amiss. Every time he went on the road, he remembers, something curious would happpen. "I am sure I was spied on. I knew I was. A lotta people don't know that I knew that I was, because I learned to watch people as hard as they watched me. Here I was an American and had to tiptoe through that situation, y'understand. Knowing how our beautiful country is, but also from listening to J. Edgar Hoover and hearing what this cat was doin' to show business people, I began to recognize a thing or two. Now I was in show business, so what was gonna make me any different? A prominent black entertainer like me, never been dangerous to anybody, but I do speak out on the few things I know something about.
"There's been a lot of times when I felt somebody was settin' me up. Even when I'd go into hotel rooms, I'd check ëem out, look in the closets, under the bed, and everywhere. Especially if somebody around me had acted a little bit strange. Like the night clerk gives himself away, and he doesn't know it: I'd spot those things. I went through a period of this in the sixties. I'd come back from the gig, and my room had been torn up, like they'd been lookin' for something. Do you know how that makes a person feel? They were just wasting their fucking time fooling with me because I didn't do shit. If they were looking for drugs, say, then they got the wrong guy; I will break my foot off in anyone's ass if they come into my place with their cocaine or crack and I find out they got it."
Because of the volatility of black-white relationships in those times and because of the demands of show business, Bo and Kay had to work out their own unique lifestyle. Bo would have preferred Kay to have kept a low profile, particularly when touring the South, but though she agreed to some restrictions, she was still eager to be part of the entire scene.
"See, Kay was smart and artistic, and so she had an urge to be out there. But I had to be in the travellin' end of the business; didn't have no choice. But that wasn't all bad, ëcos I feel my music kept a lot of people's sanity. They'd work hard, hear Bo Diddley's music and go out and start a new day, refreshed. But Kay didn't understand that this was hard work. She wanted to go everywhere with me. But I didn't want her to travel with me everywhere. Our two kids were born in 1961 and 1962. If something would have happened to us, both parents would have been gone, or both messed up, and that wasn't fair to the kids. I preferred to be the one who took all the chances, leave her at home with the girls, so that if something happened to me--god forbid-- she'd be there to care for them. Plus there was all this funky stuff goin' on with the FBI and the local police. ëI'll take the risks,' I told her.
"For a time I had three houses in D.C., one on Rhode Island Avenue, where I had my studio, one on Rittenhauser Street, and another some other place, I forget exactly where. Back then you'd buy a house in the city for seventeen five. I tried renting ëem, but I didn't know what I was doing: I was headed in the right direction, but I was travellin' at the wrong speed! It was weird, because I rented ëem to people who didn't pay me no rent because they figured I didn't need the money. All of my musicians lived in there, and put their dirty feet up."
"Terri was born when we were living at 812 Rittenhauser Street, and Kay's Mom, Eula Reynolds, came to be with us, but she wouldn't have nothing to do with the baby. She looked at it and her first words were: ëIt's not white and it's not black. What kinda baby is it?' Now that was because she was from the old country, you know what I mean, and she was shocked. She was shocked first of all because her daughter's got a baby and she never knew anything about it, never saw her while she was pregnant. That wasn't too healthy for her! But later she kinda dealt with the idea and realized, ëI'm a Grandma!' but she was a good woman, very strong, but set in her old ways. She was very nice to me; I don't know if it was legitimate, authentic, or whatever. And when the girls got older she became partial to them; she was crazy about Terri, but Terri never returned it, whereas she took very little time with Tammi, and Tammi was the one who was crazy about her.
"Now Tammi was a little bit darker than Terri. Y'know, in every mixed couple like me and Kay that I've seen, none of their children are of the same complexion. If the first one's dark, then the next one might be lighter, and the one after that just a shade lighter still. Or it might go the other way, from lighter to dark. It's a strange process, depending whose pigmentation is dominant in the system and so I never worried about it; I've seen so many mixed couples with mulatto children. We thought of ours as a very special tribe: the ëBokay Race' we used to call ëem!
"I'm very proud of living in a country that seems to be learning some sense about everyday people. I heard Bill Cosby say something on TV that interested me. First of all, he says, ëWhy are there so many light-skinned black people?' And that was a good question, because a lot of people don't understand that you are what you are. Me, I'm a black Frenchman, a Creole. Now he said what I have been saying for years--who went across the fence? Only he said it a different way, ëWho was creepin' in the night?' And a lot of times it wasn't creepin' in the dark, it was walkin' in the daytime! I know a lotta black cats say they won't cross racial lines: ëI don't want no white woman; nothin' lighter than me'--that sort of thing. But just you turn the light out, huh, huh, and wait and see and then turn the light on and you'll catch a whole lotta dudes tippy-toeing around. Turn the light out and then...you will... see... who is authentic!
"So Bill Cosby's thing was that white slave owners took the slave women by force, and of course this happened--everyone knows that--and this made black folks resentful. But I can't worry about what was done to my people generations ago. I know what they lived through--weren't pretty--but I live in this day, this age, and it's the problems we face today we gotta worry about. Let's find who's responsible for today's problems, today, baby."
In every sense these Washington, D.C. years were fertile ones for Bo and Kay. Within the space of their first three years together, they brought into the world their two daughters, as well as acquired three houses, and Bo had recorded and Kay had processed and sent up to the Chesses no fewer than an incredible 92 songs. This formidable number seems to have overwhelmed the Chess capacity for evaluation and production, and many of these songs remained unissued. Among the unissued items was an entire run of 18 recordings made in February, 1961 (and what Bo Diddley fan wouldn't want to hear from among these "The Soup Maker," with Bo on piano, or "Watusi Bounce," with Bo on drums?), as well as another 19 songs recorded at other times in 1961 and 1962.
Leonard Chess took all the remaining numbers that Kay sent during this period and fashioned them into five compilations which he released steadily from early 1961 to late 1962. The first was the brilliant Bo Diddley is A Gunslinger which, being a million-seller, led Chess to embark on a marketing strategy that amounted to little short of Diddley overkill. For next came Bo Diddley is a Lover (Checker 2980); then Bo Diddley's a Twister (Checker 2982); followed by Bo Diddley (Checker 2984), his second album by that title and the only other of these five albums to chart; and, finally, Bo Diddley and Company (Checker 2985), the album that introduced to the Diddley fandom the fabulous face and figure of the Duchess, Norma Jean Wofford.
These last four albums showed the expanded range and wealth of singing and playing styles with which Bo began the sixties. There were novelty songs like "Hong Kong, Mississippi" ("She says she's from: Hong Kong/But she don't sound like where she says she's from") and "Not Guilty," where the Bo-Ettes-- the "non-singing girls" of Kay's recollection--give Bo the third degree about his life as a rock singer ("Is it true that the women faint?"/"Well some of ëem do, and some of ëem cain't"). "Bo's Vacation," a comedy of manners ghetto-style, is among the funniest of Bo's street-corner raps, with Bo singing both parts: Joe, the unsuspecting cuckold who's going home to his wife for a short vacation, and "Bo," her secret lover, who tells Joe with more and more urgency to "call home first" in case his wife should tell him "to hold it up for a few days." This is Bo as the Rabelais of Rock.
There are seminal rockers like the booming "Can't Judge a Book by the Cover," which stayed in the Billboard Top Fifty for ten weeks in the summer of ë62; self-proclaimers like "Bo Diddley is Loose," which gives chest-thumping a new dimension, and "Bo's a Lumberjack," where Bo gives off enough combustion to start a forest fire. Another scorcher is "She's Alright," a little soul number that could give the mighty James Brown a run for his money. "Babes in the Wood" is a tragi-comic enactment of the nursery rhyme ("Oh, my dear/They were stolen away/On a bright and sunny day"), possibly a song for Kay who was expecting Terri in the spring of 1961. There is the stunning "Bo's Blues"--also known as "Call Me"--where Bo plays wrenching solos and interspersions on his trombone mouthpiece (though, according to one discography, the Chesses seem to have mistaken this for a violin).
In addition, there are prototypical Diddley instrumentals, like the pounding "Twister" that features a sensational guitar duet with Lady Bo, the bouncy "Detour"--which introduces Billy Johnson, the guitarist who replaced Lady Bo for a while when she was forced to take her "extended leave of absence" from Bo's band--and the astonishing, textually rich "Congo," a variation of the "Roadrunner" track ("sounds like Jimi Hendrix ten years early," wrote Michael Lydon in Boogie Lightning). Yet other songs link the South with the Northern city: "Help Out," with its Pentecostal tinging, and the wonderful "Put the Shoes on Willie," where a barefooted brother gets dressed up for the first time to dazzle his uncles and his aunts.
Two songs released in this period that ought not to be overlooked date from recording sessions done in 1955, however. "Little Girl," anthologized on Bo Diddley and Company, was recorded in March, 1955, and remains important as a fine representation of the harmonica virtuosity of Billy Boy Arnold, Bo's buddy from the Maxwell Street days. The other holdover from 1955 was "I'm Looking for a Woman" on the Twister album, a song most probably recorded in November of that year. "I'm Looking for a Woman" is Bo in his best R & B/Rock ën' Roll incarnation: it illustrates superbly Bo's belting vocal style and his sizzling guitar work (he and Jody Williams, who plays second guitar, were perhaps never in better harmony than on this number), and it is a paradigm of what a rock and roll solo can be. Typically, a Diddley guitar solo consists of an ironic comment or musical parody on the song's lyrical contents. In "I'm Looking for a Woman," he sings about finding a woman and telling her what he "liked," but he receives the deadliest of kiss-offs, the blunt appraisal that he was "a country boy," and should go back to his "cot-ton wife." And while Bo tries to recover with a kiss-off of his own ("So long, momma; I said, baby, bye-bye you bye"), it's the woman who really bests the man. Thus, Bo follows this laughable story of the battle of the sexes with a playful, mischievous solo consisting of musical guffaws, giggles, and snorts that capture the sheer absurdity of these contests and the impossibility--at least in his mind--of the reconciliation of these eternally tussling opposites.
From the time of his first album in 1958, then, to the end of 1962, a period of five years, Bo had released nine albums. A pretty good level of production for any artist, but it's clear that the most productive moments in this period started with the Gunslinger album and those intense early days with Kay Reynolds in Washington, D.C. Kay's presence served as an unqualified stimulus for Bo, ultimately resulting in an immense second wave of Diddley classics. Though other classics were still to come, Bo was perhaps never again to create rock and roll music at quite the same prodigious rate.
At that very time, music of a different kind was being made elsewhere in the city under the auspices of the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. On April 16, 1962, for instance, she and President Kennedy entertained nearly 600 young people at what was called a musicale on the lawn of the White House. It was the third of Mrs. Kennedy's celebrated "musical programs for youth by youth." A newspaper report of the event suggested that "the setting could not have been lovelier. The elms were green, the magnolias were in bloom, and the fountain was playing." That day the audience, mostly children of government officials, heard the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra open with Aaron Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." In brief welcoming remarks, the President had said that music "is a part of American life which I think is somewhat unheralded around the world. But," he continued, "this emphasis upon artistic achievement in music is a source of satisfaction and pride to us all."
Just how eclectic this interest of the Kennedys was in American music-making was proved a few weeks later when Bo Diddley, one of the original rock and rollers, found himself performing in those very same serene surroundings that had previously been reserved for the Washington elite.
The phone call had come only days after the musicale: "Could Mr. Diddley perform at the White House for a private party that the Kennedy's would be holding outdoors early next month?" No one seems to remember exactly whose idea it was to have Bo Diddley play the White House, but the call had come from Mrs. Kennedy's office and Mrs. Kennedy had already set precedents in First Lady protocol by engaging jazz ensembles for White House functions. She was also said to have a particular fondness for the bossa nova, a romantic Latin rhythm then much in vogue. But rock and roll was a new departure. However, this was the American Camelot.
When Bo arrived for his show at the White House he was amazed to discover that the South Lawn bore a closer resemblance to an al fresco 708 Club than to the sedate scene he had imagined.
"I did not know that the people that made our laws were so rowdy!" he says with a deep laugh. "It blew my mind because I had no idea that these people did all that kind of hootin' and hollerin'.
"That gig was fun, man. JFK was down in Cuba or somewhere or the other, so I didn't meet either him or Jackie. But the rest of ëem--whew! All I knew was I was playing my thing, and when we got through these people were all full of wine and everything. Man, they was having a ball--they really boogied!"
Because of his absence on this occasion, no one knows for sure whether JFK ever heard the song that Bo had written and recorded only a few months before alluding specifically to Kennedy's role as a national leader. The number was called "Mr. Krushchev." It was a powerhouse of a song, a real humdinger, one of Bo's very best, a political and social statement expressed in Bo's usual jocular and epigrammatic fashion, framed with a ringing chorus of "Hey-A-Hey, Hey, Kroo-chev," and propelled by a surging beat from Bo's acoustic guitar.
Bo envisions himself as "Sergeant" Diddley addressing raw recruits. He sets them marching to a rocking refrain, "Hut, two; a-three-four." Then he tells them that he intends to go overseas to see Krushchev, and, just like Kennedy, he will confront the Soviet leader over his unlimited testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, a practice dangerous to everyone on earth. Unlike Kennedy, Bo does not feel constrained by the niceties of diplomatic discourse. Of Krushchev he sings bluntly:
He don't believe that water's wet!
If he did, he'd stop those tests.
JFK can't do it by himself;
C'mon, fellas, let's give him a little help.
We as Americans can understand:
We got to u-nite to protect our land.
We gotta keep on A-lert, To keep our families from getting hurt.
We don't want no six-wheeled bus, No bald-headed Krushchev plottin' on us. Hey, Krushchev; Hey-Eh, Krushchev, Yeah-A Hey, Krushchev.
With its terse, timely message, its precise, measured rhythms, and the delicious fun with the recruits as he fades out ("I want my Momma."/"Your Momma can't help you now! This is Sergeant Diddley talking: I want you to recognize these stripes on my shoulder"), this song is probably Bo's piece de resistance, a magnificent melding of imagination, relentless rock, and pure cornball, in which the singer's giant personality subsumes all possible protests of improbability.
If that's the case, then surely we would expect "Mr. Krushchev" to be better known? And what of the enigmatic reference to a "six-wheeled bus"?
"I was real proud of that song," says Bo. "But nobody would play it. No. . . radio. . . station. . . would play it! Now how come if I write a song that supports the President, and that's against our so-called enemies, no one will play it? You know why? The only way I can figure it is that there must have been a lot of what I call closet Communists kept it off.
"Yes, I was proud of that number. I was trying to say something to young people. Like when I said, ëJFK can't do it by himself/C'mon, fellas, let's give him a little help,' y'understand, that meant something to me right there.
"Now another reason I didn't get any air time was maybe my saying, ëWe don't need no six-wheel bus.' I was talking about down South, where we was fighting over buses--a bus got six wheels, see--where blacks were riding in the back and whites were riding in the front. (To tell you the truth I've always preferred riding in the back! You know why? Because when the motherfucker goes over a cliff, guess who's in the front! Ha!) And that's the way most blacks were thinking: ëIf I want to ride in the back, I will. If I want to ride in the front, I will. But don't tell me where I have to ride!' I guess you could call that line my little civil rights statement, and that's maybe why the song was never played."
Bo very soon suppressed "Mr. Krushchev" from his repertoire and had almost totally forgotten the number until it was insistently requested by a pair of vociferous fans while he was on tour in England in 1963. Bo returned from that tour only a few days before the President's assassination. After Kennedy's death he determined never to sing the song again, and was only once persuaded to do so--at a performance in Montreux in 1972. "But it just didn't feel right," says Bo.
Clearly the first modern President committed to full civil rights for black Americans, Kennedy had captured Bo's imagination more fully than any other President before or since. "See, John Kennedy wasn't just wrapped up in civil rights here at home, but in other people's problems abroad, too. He knew that in some areas America could help other countries, the poor countries, help them with our know-how. We could teach them first how to deal with their problems, then back off and let them do their own thing. That's what Kennedy had in mind with the Peace Corps. I admired him a heck of a lot for that. Any decent American would.
"But the system didn't want John Kennedy doing these things. He got too friendly with the black man, for many people's liking. That's what I think. And they took his life, man. I say Oswald ain't the one that killed the man. He was the fall guy, sure, but there was a whole lotta heavy people involved in that scene. It just hurts to think about it. That was such a painful time, man."