Today, ensconced in his rural retreat, Bo does things pretty much his own way. One day, for instance, before strolling over to his home studio for a lengthy practice session for his next album, he finds time to pay a courtesy call on Schmoo. This could be interesting, for Schmoo is a privileged member of the Diddley household. She is the oldest of Bo's four free-ranging dogs, the result of his crossbreeding of Blue Tick Heelers with Australian Dingos. "My Australian friends can't understand it," says Bo with a laugh, "how I can have dingo blood around, but I've wrestled ëem from when they were babies, so it's cool!" The Diddley Dog is a strange, mixed breed that looks as though it might have come from the darker pages of Greek mythology. Schmoo, for example, has the tough, grizzled coat of her Southern ancestry juxtaposed with the stocky build of her Down Under side. But it is her face that most engages a visitor's attention. Unlike the rest of her blood relatives, most of whom are placid and friendly, Schmoo is a distinctly uptight dog. Her eyes are wild and restless; her muzzle is flat and powerful, as though specifically adapted for the painful nips she is famous for inflicting on human ankles through the open steps leading to the studio entrance. This side of her temperament has not been improved by the fact that three days ago she delivered a litter of a half dozen puppies. First-time visitors to Bo's place generally require protection from Schmoo. "You got them babies?" murmurs Bo soothingly as he peers in the shed where Schmoo lives. "That's alright, Schmoo. He ain't comin' at your puppies. Hear ëem in there hollerin'?" "I'll leave it open for you," Bo tells her solicitously as he fastens back the door to the space that Schmoo and her whimpering litter share with an extraordinary stretch go-cart. At the suggestion of one of his aides, Bo is fine-tuning the vehicle for a yet-to-be-arranged "Bo Diddley-vs-Chuck Berry Go-Cart Battle" that will settle once and for all the question of which of the two veteran rockers is the baddest.
Then Bo leads the way across a newly sodded lawn to his studio, another deluxe trailer that sits at right angles to his main house. He pins back the door to this building with a cinder block and then jogs up the stairs and steps inside.
It's going to be a full day of studio work on this glorious Florida day. A nephew, Ricky Jolivet--well known around Washington, D.C. night spots as the guitarist "Bo Diddley Junior"--is here, as are the East Coast Rollers, a Florida-based group who often act as backup for the Coasters, with whom Bo played a gig a few weeks back. Bo's regular staffers, Scott Deverin Smith and Ronnie Haughbrook, also stand ready. Behind them the studio wall is plastered with souvenirs and debris Bo has picked up on his travels or received in the mail: photos sent by fans, old and new promos, and bumper stickers--diplomas of a life lived on the road--that carry messages like "Damn I'm Good," "Hugs not Drugs," and that Southern favorite, "Shit Happens."
As Bo calls for the iron stool he bought just the other day at a resale shop for its ideal height and durability, Scottie starts setting up the tape on the intricate recording arrangement that occupies an entire side of the large room. The apparatus looks like it could be a neurologist's model of the human brain: a morass of wires in various thicknesses and colors spills from the back of the assembly which is bolted to a console made of framing studs and plywood. The installation was completed only recently, and the tang of freshly sawed wood still lingers in the air. There's tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment here, Bo explains, all supplied by Manny's Music on 47th Street in New York, "supernice people" who had helped him out a few years back when his credit got screwed up following his divorce from Kay.
"Did you copy them other lyrics, so we each got a copy?" he asks Scottie.
"I ain't had time, man. I was working on the video till dawn. Make Ron do that," comes the aggrieved reply.
Copies or not, they get started. Bo leans over and picks up his newest toy, a PG 380 synth guitar given to him by the Casio Company during his tour of Japan with Ron Wood. "It's altered my whole way of playing," he says delightedly. "It has a new sound, a new resonance. They don't even have the cartridges for it yet!" He adjusts a few knobs here and there to his satisfaction as he feels out the various settings, all the while playing with a bewitching ease and disregarding totally an excruciating flash of feedback that leaves everyone else in the room momentarily deaf. In due course the fellas chime in: Ronnie on bass, Scottie on keyboards, Rickey on rhythm.
Today's project is all part of the preparation for an album Bo calls, with characteristic bluntness, Breakin' Through the B.S. It will contain songs about how to get things done: how to conduct foreign policy in an age of anti-Americanism, how to maintain spirits at home, and how to combat drugs. "We have the torch and the matches," he says. "It's up to us how bright we wanna burn it." He's especially hopeful for the song he's laying down at this moment called "Down with the Pusher," a completely fresh version of a number by virtually the same name that he had done in the early seventies. (Bo Diddley has been actively campaigning against drugs for well over twenty years now). He has traded in the funk of the original and gone instead for a modern sound, a rap, pure and simple.
"That's where you start, right there. Right there at that change," he instructs Rickey, who taps into the tune with a beautiful Bo-beat layering.
"I need Ron to come back in after the solo. Give me a big break there."
"Now come in. There you go!"
"Two voices, now. Three voices."
They carry on in this fashion for thirty or forty minutes, Bo coaching and working the band hard, getting just the right detailing for the basic track. Though it's still in the experimental stage, the number begins to emerge as a coherent whole.
"Whaddya think is best?" Bo asks Scottie at one stage. "I might be doing too much of it, too much reverb."
"No. I was just seeing how much you were doing. How far you were going."
"You was laughin' at me though!" says Bo, with a twinkle in his eye. "Hah!"
Though the atmosphere is good natured, the song itself is a serious piece of work, with a theme close to Bo's heart, saving kids from drugs. It's something he knows first-hand, both from what he sees daily around the country, and from experiences within his own family. Two of his younger kin, he reveals, have seen heavy duty in the drug trenches. So the song he's creating tells of fighting the battle the only way he thinks possible, one kid at a time.
In his rap he assumes the voice of a defiant principal who speaks in internal rhyme: "You don't bring that stuff around my school, you fool. You gotta use a better tool. You can't cut through my golden rules." Then other voices come in with a staccato, choric rap, "Cocaine is for horses, not men. We-know-it's-gonna-kill-you, but we don't know when." Finally, the cry is taken up by an outraged community, represented by the voices of the entire band, "We don't need your crack, Jack. So now don't be back, unless you want to suffer a whack-attack."
Bo and the fellas continue work on this salutary message for some while, but all of a sudden there is a colossal interruption. A terrible din has broken out just outside the studio, an unholy gnashing and snarling. In a postpartum fury, Schmoo is busy chewing up one of the young male dogs who has strayed unwittingly across the invisible border to her territory. Bo drops everything and dashes for the door. Trying to anticipate Bo's move, a visitor stupidly gets in his way but is removed with a single sweep of Bo's powerful arm. Bo flashes a quick smile of apology and heads outside.
Dust is flying in all directions from under the trailer.
"Hey, get away from that dog," Bo yells at the two fighting animals. Miraculously, as if by some prior training, each dog appears to know who is to get away from whom, and they separate. Schmoo reluctantly hauls her sagging frame back to her shed while the younger dog remains to be consoled by Bo, who stays with him until he's sure the dust, both literal and canine, has settled.
The episode with the dogs seems to have broken the momentum of the recording work. "Sylvia," calls Bo in a soft-soap voice to a nearby kitchen window, "let me have one of those biscuits. I'm hungry as hell. I ain't had nothin' this morning. I want a biscuit with some butter."
All business, Sylvia calls back that the biscuits are for dinner, that she'll have to ration them. "Now I'm trying to be nice," Bo teases. "I don't want to have to go into my Chicago shit now!"
When the biscuits arrive, the men dig in like crazy, some scooping two biscuits at a time. It looks like bad manners, but it's just common sense; they know Bo will grab the whole pan if he gets a chance.
"Getch'alls hands offa them," bawls Bo, who by this time has managed to get a few for himself. Then to Sylvia: "Hey, baby. You better guard them suckers. These are the best damn rolls in town. You give me one more, and I'll tell you just how good they are!"
Could it have been anything like this at Chess Records, someone asks.
"We didn't get no biscuits, that's for sure," Bo replies, one cheek bulging with a biscuit taken whole.
"Nah! It was a totally different set up. For one thing we did all our rehearsal off-tape. Now we run the tape all the time. Leonard and them would sit in the booth with this little reel-to-reel, you know. And there were microphones behind the burlap on the wall. You didn't interact much. He'd just say, ëCut,' or ëNo good,' ëTake one,' or somethin' like that. You pretty much had to be your own producer in the beginning. You knew if something was gonna get screwed up, it'd be on their side of the glass and not yours. I cain't tell you, man, how many hours I spent in the studio in those days trying to make sure that what we put out was good, was worthy of us, y'understand."
The initial harvest of Bo's years with Chess was garnered on his first two albums, issued in 1958 and 1959 respectively. Consisting, with only one exception, of tracks issued as singles, the albums Bo Diddley (Chess LP 1431) and Go Bo Diddley (Chess LP 1436), both reissued by MCA in 1986, represented a virtual retrospective of Bo's first three years as a recorded artist. By any standard they were a fine achievement.
Before they so much as opened the package, fans would have been struck by the cover of Bo Diddley, which featured an action shot of Bo by the celebrated photographer Chuck Stewart. Bo stands like a colossus, with legs spread far apart, feet planted firmly. He wields a beautiful, gleaming Gretsch enameled in grenadier red, the color he would favor for his guitars for the next twenty years or so. He sports a white tux. His expression is pugnacious. The stance, the facial expression, and the dramatic contrast in color between the instrument and the jacket, combine to capture the excitement and imply the danger of the product inside. It was a good start for Diddley cover art, and it set the tone for Bo's emerging style.
Inside there was a wealth of Diddley delights--"Bo Diddley" and "I'm, a Man", of course--but other songs that testified to the sheer variety of Bo's music, from the rocking love story of "Diddy Wha Diddy," to the more stoic refrains of "Bossman," with its images of strikes, hungry kids, and rent arrears. "Pretty Thing"--with its series of brilliant syncopated breaks filling out the introduction and solo-served as an early showcase for Bo's hypnotic guitar skills, and, to this day, remains one of the classic Diddley rhythm tracks.
In another enduring number, "Hey! Bo Diddley," he borrows a line from that well-known standard "Old MacDonald," but on his farm Bo Diddley collects beautiful women rather than barnyard animals ("women here, women everywhere"), whom he chases across the field, "slippin' and slidin' like an automobile." (In Diddley phonemics "field" rhymes nicely with "automobile"). This is one of Bo's most compelling compositions, a fragment of childish nonsense turned into a rock-and-roll frolic, and the cuts and chops of the closing phrases are among the most delicious doses of Diddley guitar to be found in the entire canon.
For all the successes of Bo's first album, his second, Go Bo Diddley, might be considered as even better. Except for three tracks put down by Bo in his first three months at Chess, all of the numbers on this album were recorded in 1958, providing a measure of the sophistication he and his group had achieved in three years of intensive playing. "Bo's Guitar"--the first of his many instrumentals-- is a superb introduction to some of his famous effects: the wolf-whistle, the skidding sounds, the musicalization of shooting stars and jet take-offs, all of which are now part of the basic vocabulary of today's rock-and-roll guitarists, particularly the heavy metalists. There is also "Crackin' Up," a song in the doo-wop vein, that is highlighted by the plangent tones of Bo's guitar work and by the precise and delicate interplay of the maracas and drums. There is "Willie and Lillie," a poignant story of hillbilly love ("Up on the mountain, I was facing the moon / Every little star tell me I see Lillie soon"); and the soulful "I'm Sorry" with its hesitant but deeply intimate confessing. Then there is that rarest item of all, a Diddley violin piece entitled "The Clock Struck Twelve." To say that Bo plays the violin on this last number fails to capture fully what he does. He treats his violin like a guitar, working the bow in deliciously slow Cajun slides, overriding the strings, then plucking them rhythmically as he fades out. The result is the blusiest of blues, sonorously intense.
For contrast, there's "Oh Yeah," where a bragging Casanova tells his street-corner buddies how he faced down the hue and cry from his girl's distrustful parents; and there's "Don't Let It Go," a riotous, side-splitting account of Bo in the role of rock star, handling a group of fans who come to his house in the middle of the night ("Put on my hat, put on my shoes / I went out the door to see what I could do!")
Another of the special joys of these albums (particularly now that they have been deftly remastered by MCA producer Steve Hoffman) is re-discovering the skills of Bo's fellow musicians. Throughout both albums there is the rich bass playing of the great Willie Dixon, the man of whom Bo says, "Willie was Chess, its heart and soul," and who, right up until his death, continued to work for the preservation of black heritage and for the study of what he called the Four R's: "Readin', Writing, ëRithmatic, and Rhythm and Blues." There is also the dazzling piano play of Otis Spann, particularly on "You Don't Love Me," one of the numbers from 1955, and the fine percussion of Frank Kirkland, whose stick work on "Bring It to Jerome" appears to consist entirely of rim shots, brilliantly and meticulously timed.
But perhaps none of Bo's Chessmates of that time is as intriguing as his second guitarist, Jody Williams, whose artistry is first apparent on the wondrous and magical "Who Do You Love," one of the finest songs that Bo Diddley ever recorded.
Jody Williams was one of the great undiscovered guitar players of his time. Certainly Bo feels he deserves a special mention. "I didn't find Jody; he came looking for me," he says. "That was in our teen days, and I knew he was something special even then. We called him ëLittle Joe" or ëPapa Joe' so as not to get him mixed up with Joe Williams, but his real name was Joseph Leon Williams."
Jody and Bo had started practicing guitar at about the same time. In those early Langley Avenue days Bo was the instructor and Jody the student, but they were attracted to different aspects of playing and through serious study Jody soon developed a distinct proficiency in jazz and R & B. His style was pure steel, and by the early 50's he was leading for the mighty Howlin' Wolf, sitting in on numerous Chess sessions, and touring incessantly. He had been all around the country before he was out of his teens. An Apollo Theatre brochure for those years captures him in a montage of stage shots, playing the guitar behind his head, Jimi Hendrix-style.
Who knows if Jody Williams could also play with his teeth as Hendrix did, but certainly he seemed to be able to do it all. His cherubic face and engaging smile were welcomed wherever he went. Yet, despite recording with the best of them--B. B. King, Muddy Waters, and of course Bo Diddley--and despite making some fine cuts of his own for Argo and Cobra, Jody Williams was never tapped for fame. In 1958 he was drafted into the Army and went to Germany. There he studied electronics, eventually settling for a more predictable life in that field and setting aside, more or less permanently, his huge musical talent. Jody Williams was last heard of in 1974 when Dick Shurman did a special piece on him for Living Blues. To this day, however, fans still inquire after the identity of the uncredited guitarist who played the phenomenal solo on Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love."
What Little Joe brought to "Who Do You Love" was a choppy, chunky, string-bending style that built perfectly upon the foundation of Bo's rhythm line and echoed with power and craft the eerie ferocity of Bo's mind-blowing lyrics. But, as Bo explains, that these illustrious lyrics were ever born at all was an accident: "I didn't have any particular concept in mind when I wrote the number, but I was into using everyday words, so I started with the idea of me saying to the girl, ëWho do you love, baby? Me, or him?' Hah, hah!"
"And then I got the idea of making it a signifying tune: I heard these kids, these little bitty dudes, through the window and they was insultin' one another like dogs, man! Well, I'd done plenty of that myself as a kid: the next cat would say something about me, so I'd say something about him, and when we ran out of stuff to call one another then we'd get real nasty and say things about one another's mother! So when I'm singing, ëRode a lion to town, used a rattlesnake whip / Take it easy, baby, don't you give me no lip,' I'm saying to the girl, ëI'm badder than the next guy. Momma, you're supposed to go with me! I can protect you, ya dig, a cat with all that artillery!'"
Though never making the charts (its earthy, almost voodoo quality was perhaps too strong to command general appeal in the late 50's, when silky smooth was the common denominator for the expression of sexual desire), "Who Do You Love" has since become Bo Diddley's most frequently covered song. In successive versions Ronnie Hawkins and the Band caught its primal nature and rode a wave with it; Quicksilver Messenger Service transformed it into an amazing psychedelic marathon; Jim Morrison and the Doors took it off its hinges; George Thorogood celebrated its "good-time music, and the Bo Diddley beat"; and lately the Bone Daddies, a sensational Los Angeles group who have occasionally backed Bo, have given it back what it had in the first place, guts and a snarl. Bo has even "covered" his own song himself when, working once again with Willie Dixon, he created the eerie, threat-laden version that opens the soundtrack of the movie "La Bamba," the life-story of Richie Valens.
One other number of that date, "Before You Accuse Me," from the first album, deserves special mention. Despite its grim theme of reciprocal cheating ("You say I've been seein' other women / Well, you've been takin' money from some other man"), this tune has likewise known a revival. That, of course, is because it appeared in a reworking by Eric Clapton on his highly successful Journeyman album. Speaking of Bo's number, Clapton told a radio audience, "The song had been turning over in my head for many, many years, and when that is the case you get a pretty good idea of what you can get out of it." Later, he would tell rock journalist, Timothy White, that during the Journeyman sessions Bo's song was "like a God-given sign" when he and fellow bluesman Robert Cray had reached an impasse in their recording work. "[Then Robert] put that song in my mind and said, ëDo that!'--just to pass the time. We played it all day, then picked a take we liked; it was a lifesaver."
True to form, Clapton adopts Bo's original line from the 1957 recording--an infectious blues bounce with lead-guitar exfoliations--and then overlays this with his own superb embellishments. Though Clapton's vocal delivery is less passionate than Bo's (he was said to have third-degree flu that day), the outcome is a magnificent, full-blooded rendition of "Before You Accuse Me" that surely gives pleasure to fans of Slow Hand and Diddley alike.
Like many of his songs of this period, "Before You Accuse Me" was an outgrowth of the roller coaster relationship that Bo had with his second wife, Tootsie. One close eye-witness to that relationship was their daughter, Tanya McDaniel Mitchell, now a mother of four and herself a veteran of two marriages, including one in which her husband was brutally murdered by street thugs. According to Tanya, Bo and Toots wrote many songs together and often, as with this one, they portrayed a male figure locked in bitter combat with a female adversary. From Tanya's point of view however, this condition more closely resembled fact than fiction.
"My Mom and Dad could be fighting, then all of a sudden he'd say, ëOh, I got something!' And he'd run and get an instrument and throw something together, and she'd work with him on it, making suggestions right there in the middle of their fight! That's how he wrote ëBefore you Accuse Me.' ëI'm Sorry' and ëCrackin' Up' came about in the same way. He wrote a lot of slow songs like those three, because he knows he can sing the heck out of ballads like that. He's good at anything with feeling where he has to really dig deep down to get it right. With other songs, sometimes he'd just be messing around and we kids would all be at his feet, and he would be, as you say, jammin', and something would come out of it. I was dancing to all that then as a little girl!"
"My Mom and Dad loved one another, but they fought hard! Today they joke around on the phone about it. She's remarried, you know, and occasionally if he's in Chicago he'll go over and have dinner with them. But in the old days when they were feudin' my Mom would play crazy gags on him! She used to do things and get him arrested! The cops knew it. He'd be in his garage, fixing on his car, and the police would come to arrest him. My Mom had set him up, doing her crazy stuff!"
"But they both strayed away. I think that space destroyed them, y'know, not being able to cope with being apart, with my father away from home so much. And so they felt they needed mates. That's what I believe happened. So you see I grew up a very wise little girl! I was 14 when they divorced. I just had to stand back and sorta put all the cards together for myself."
"There were times when it was great being Bo Diddley's daughter, like the time at the Regal Theatre in Chicago when I was a little girl, and I had my chin on the stage and this huge crowd was cheering him, but I knew he was playing just for me because he was lookin' down at me and smiling and winking. Whenever he came home after trips, he always wanted me and my brother Anthony to stay home from school a couple of days. That's a trait of his--he tries it today with his grandkids--he thinks everything has to stop: no school, no anything. ëGrandpa said I could stay home,' they say! He wants them to spend all the time with him possible."
"But there were other times when it was painful being his daughter. I can see that as I look back on it as an adult. At one time my Mom and Dad were very much in love, you know. Any one could see he'd take on the world for her, and for many years he did."
Few rockers will deny that travel is a necessary bane of their profession, but with forty-five years of it behind him, few have travelled as extensively as Bo, with other American entertainers of his generation close behind. Today, on most weekends of the year, for instance, he crisscrosses the country by air, maintaining a schedule of appearances that would exhaust even a Presidential candidate. But in the beginning, unless a band bus was provided by the promoter--which was generally only the case on multi-city tours--Bo was forced to rely on his own set of wheels. At first this would be his trusty Zephyr or his 1949 Chevrolet station wagon. Then came a succession of Cadillacs provided by his record company (no notion then of calling them company cars, which in effect they were). And after that, he used--a hearse.
"Man, you couldn't beat a hearse for stowing guitars and drums and such," Bo chuckles. "I went through two or three of them that I got from the used car dealer. Rode ëem all across the country. And there was no better buy in town because you've gotta know a hearse has been ëdriven gently'! Just a coupla trips to the graveyard and back real slow. That's the most glamorous ride in the world, but the dude it's for don't even know he's ridin'!"
Bo's first road trip ever was a week-long swing through the Deep South to New Orleans that took him to, of all places, his birthplace of McComb, Mississippi. "The first contract I got to tour was for seven hundred dollars. Seven hundred dollars! I sat up all night looking at that piece of paper this way and that because I couldn't figure how somebody's gonna pay me seven hundred bucks just for singing a song. I thought maybe it might've been a misprint. Wasn't till I got back that I realized seven times seven hundred wouldn't hardly have been enough to pay for what I had to pay on that trip--gas, food, rooms, union dues. I made it home with just 35 cents in my pocket! They graduated me on that trip, man. Put me from kindergarten right through college, hah!"
Travel, once begun, became incessant. "I was travellin' all the time, he says. "You see, I was travelling to build up what has kept me here: a ëthing' with the people, my fans. I figured in order to do that I had to work at it. Dinah Washington told me that when I was a little bitty dude startin' out. She said, ëIf you want to be a star, Bo, you've gotta work at it.'"
Bo was so driven to travel in those days that it required two drummers to keep up with his schedule. Neither Clifton James nor Frank Kirkland was prepared to stay on the road as long as Bo was, so each spelled the other in two or three week intervals. With this alternating back-up, Bo played all the principal nationwide tours of those times: Irvin Feld's "Show of Stars," "Dr. Jiveës Rhythm and Blues Review," and "The Biggest Rock and Roll Show," with the Red Prysock Rock ën' Roll Orchestra, who he accompanied in 1956 to Australia, his first trip abroad and his first of many to that part of the world.
Bo remembers all sorts of things happening on these trips: how he tripped over a wire during a show in New York and broke his ankle and Little Anthony took him to the hospital; how Bill Haley arrived backstage drunk one night, minus his pants, and Bo, being the same size, had to lend him his; how he and Fats Domino served as wheelstops for a bus stalled on a mountain road in Tennessee; how in an antiquated theatre in Boston an electric shock scorched his mouth ("it slapped me good; it's a wonder my ass weren't burned up!"); how the police in Canada warned him that if he "wiggled" on a Sunday he'd be deported, but wiggling on any other day would be okay; and how the great Ray Charles once asked politely, "Bo, do you suppose I can drive the car sometime?"
This period was also the heyday of Bo's association with Alan Freed. He played Freed's Manhattan debut, Christmas week 1955, at the Academy of Music on East 14th Street and, by all reports, left an abiding impression on his young co-star, Richie Valens. And he was the star of Freed's aptly named "Diddley Daddy Rock ën' Roll Extravaganza" which ran throughout 1956.
To maximize teen attendance, Freed planned these engagements around the school vacations. He had first demonstrated the success of this strategy at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre during the Easter week of 1955 where shows were packed every day for a full week, and by early 1957--Washington's Birthday weekend to be precise--he brought his formula for the first time to Manhattan's Times Square. There, according to one account, "teen-age rock ën' roll enthusiasts stormed the area before dawn and all day long filled sidewalks, tied up traffic and eventually required the attention of 175 policemen." It was the largest opening crowd that the Times Square Paramount had hosted, but large, clamorous audiences were to become a sign of the times. Under the title "Frenzy ën' Furor," an anonymous correspondent for the New York Times gave the show a good-natured though geriatrically slanted review, calling the scene "the theatre experience'" of his career, "a composite of a teen-age revival meeting and the Battle of the Bulge."
This was typical of the reception of rock and roll in the Northeast--welcomed by great segments of youth, regarded as an ephemeral joke by the majority of adults--but in some parts of the country, Bo recalls, it was a different, altogether more serious matter, less a question of music than of race.
"Shit, we caught holy hell back in them days, in the fifties and early sixties. We used to go through all kinds of havoc trying to push the new music. We were met with signs in Montgomery, Alabama, and all over: ëWe Don't Want Rock ën' Roll Here,' that sort of thing. They couldn't understand the boogeyin' and jumpin' around."
"You'd be going through Georgia and places like that, and man, they was nasty. One time I was tourin' with Ray Charles and he had his Band set up on stage and the KKK came messin' with us, and marchin' outside. They didn't want black music in there, no rock ën' roll, all this kind of stuff. And somebody called in and said there was a bomb in the place. You shouda seen what happened. It takes a twenty-four piece band a coupla hours to set up. It took us about two minutes to take it all down! Cats loaded the bus and said to the bus driver, ëHey, man. Let's go!' That's all they wanted: to get us out of town, man. See, they didn't want whites and blacks in there together, but when they said ëBomb,' everybody was running out together anyway! You couldn't have brought the races any closer than that!"
"But anyone that came from New York was in just as much jeopardy as I was down South. When they see a New York license plate, they'd say, ëOh my goodness. We got a fat one. We need to pick us some beans!' Those days down South was real bad news!"
"One time I was with Irwin Feld's Show of Stars. We had a bus driver called Pellegrini. He was a white guy from New Jersey. None of the dudes from New Jersey thought nothing about that segregation shit; never crossed their minds. So one time we kept looking for the bus driver, and we couldn't find him anywhere. He had taken a cab with two of the black musicians--and ridin' through Georgia, can you dig it! And the cops grabbed his ass outta there and locked him up. Somebody says, ëBo, Pellegrini's in jail!' I says, ëIn jail for what?' they say, ëHe was with us in the cab! They ran our ass off and locked him up. We cain't make the gig tonite.' I said, ëDamn. How much is it to get him out?' He said, ëI don't know, man.' I said, ëHot shit. Damn.'"
"I got just about 100 dollars left on me which I got from Charlie Carpenter who was the road manager for the show. So anyway, I go to the police station. I walk in there, pull out my little wallet, pull out this hundred dollar bill, and hand it to the sergeant behind the desk. He says, ëWhat's this for, boy?' ëWell, I come to get the bus driver--the chump got locked up.' The cat threw the money back at me, then bawled out, ëAin't no nigger gonna get no white boy outta this jail.' I said, ëMan, I don't believe this,' and I went and sat in the cab. And the cab driver said, ëI think we'd better get away from round here!' So we went on back to the auditorium."
"About twenty minutes later here come Pellegrini in a cab. They had let him out. Basically what they did was humiliate him for a few hours. They got more satisfaction out of that than sending him to jail."
"Them people didn't care nothin' about nobody. You go up to a gas station and the guy would be sittin' in front of his gas station with a shotgun inside of his door. All he gotta do is reach inside the door and get the shotgun and you pull up and say you'd like to get a tank of gas. At that time cars were carrying, what: 21 gallon tanks? And that was $15 back then--a nice piece of change--but this turkey would sit there and look at you as though you wasn't even there. I mean, I still haven't figured it out yet. What is the problem selling me some gas? That's his business. Was the problem maybe I drove up there in a Cadillac? Well, I worked to buy that car, you know. I didn't get mad when cats drove by in Rolls Royces!"
"Even if you got the gas and got going, you weren't safe, even on the road. Show you the kinda stuff that some of them messed up kids used to do. Some dudes passed by me on the road in North Carolina. Pass by you . . . see that you're black . . . go up the highway . . . turn around and come back and meet you head on and play chicken with you! Many times I've been done that and you just say, ëGod hang with me--or somebody--and just let me get to the gig and get off of this highway.'"
"I would have my license plate stolen off my car, like at a college gig or something, for a souvenir. I go to report it to the police station, and the cops would say to you, ëWell boy, you ain't got no license plate, have you?' The minute you pull out on the highway you're illegal. ëWell that ain't none of my problem, boy. All I know is you ain't got no license plates. See, you're in G-E-O-R-G-I-A now.'"
"This is what I went through trying to get rock and roll to the people. I used to wouldn't talk about it, ëcause it's like bad memories, but you have to know there was an Ignorance Curtain down there. For a while I wondered should I go down there and play?"
"And it didn't take much for you to get into trouble. One time we were in Little Rock, Arkansas, for a college thing. We were on stage playing, and somehow or the other this white girl got a little bit tipsy, and she was with two dudes and all three of ëem was drunk! And they was pulling at her and her blouse opened in the back. She was pulling away from ëem as they were snatchin' at her and then everything came off! And she was tryin' to come up on the bandstand--wanted to do a shake dance, or somethin', I guess. I looked up, and Clifton James had jumped off the bandstand and run in the back, and Jerome had jumped off the other end, and I was up there by myself! And the sheriff was standing over there by the wall, old dude, with a long pistol hangin' down, and he was just lookin' at me, and then lookin' at the girl, from one to the other. Finally, some other kids from the audience grabbed her and they took her off. I went back to playing, but the night wasn't right after that, ëcos see back then, some of them Southern white sheriffs was screwed up in the head. They didn't like the idea of us excitin' the girls."
"Another thing, back then some of them white dudes--the generation just before me--wanted any black woman they could get their hands on. Not in the light, but in the dark. They didn't want to be seen with ëem in public, but in the bush it's cool. And all the black dudes knew this kinda thing was going on, but there wasn't nothin' they could say about it. And nobody else even believed it. A lot of the white women back then knew that their husbands was doing this kinda thing, going out and hanging with the ëslave' girls. They knew this but there wasn't anything they could say about it either, because they'd get their butt whipped. White women in that kinda situation were slaves too! They had to put up with whatever their old man told ëem to do, and those men did whatever they wanted to do after the sun went down."
"You had a few fools--but I always tell people you can even find a fool in church real quick. Usually might be the first person in there!"
"I used to have cats heckle me on the stage. You know what, every time I came into that town who do I see come in there first, HIM! But he didn't come for the show; he came to heckle me. I've had letters passed up to me on stage--not lately of course--helluva letters. They would say things like, ëI don't like you. I don't like your music. You're playin' that jungle stuff. You'd better watch your back, ëcos you might get strung up around here.' So I'd get up in front of that audience and I bet you any money the dude that wrote that letter is sittin' right up front, clappin' along! So I'd just get up an I'd say something like this to the audience, ëI just got a nice letter and I hope the writer is in the audience, ëcause if you'll make yourself known to me I'm gonna break your face. And I can do it.' That must have got into the papers because I never got any more letters like that. Now I get such nice letters you wouldn't believe it, from fans and such, they'd make you cry. Real beautiful letters."
"Wasn't just the white dudes either. Black cats could be the same. Years ago there was this place down in Georgia. There was the ugliest dude right in front of me creatin' a fuss, and he had with him the most beautiful chick in the place. Between numbers he starts hollerin' at me, ëI want my money back. You got my ten dollars!' I said, ëI ain't got your ten dollars; the man at the door got your ten dollars.' He wouldn't give up. So I said to Jerome, ëOtay Outch Imne Archay and Gray Imne Ungay!' That's pig Latin for ëGo to the car and get my gun!' We used to speak that in school to keep the teacher from figuring out what we were saying, until we got one that could speak it herself!"
"When I got the gun, I jumped down off the stage and went up to the cat that kept messin' with me. The dude looked like he could make three of me. I was weighing 160, 170 pounds. I mean, standing there face to face, and punch for punch I'd give him a run for his money. But I wasn't into that! In those days I was thinking differently; I was telling myself, ëI'm into making records; I'm in-to SO-CI-ety!' I ain't got time to be playin' them old wolf games, and all that kind of stuff. I done put all that aside, y'understand. So I says to myself, ëWow, what am I gonna do?' So I figure the best thing is for me to stick my gun up his nose! And that's what I did: OOH, just like that! I said, ëDon't Move!' I said, ëMan, don't breathe too hard, ëcos I'm scared; you're bigger than I am and I don't want no problems.'"
"He was sputtering, ëMa. . . Ma. . . Man. I. . . I. . . I was just playin'.'
"I said, ëyou ain't playin'. You wanted to jump on me, didn't ya?'
"ëNo, man, no.'
"And the girl was running around behind him saying, ëBo Diddley, don't shoot ëim!'
"I said, ëGet away from me. Getaway all of y'all!'"
"I didn't want to hurt him though. When he left , the manager must have called the police, because the cops caught hold of him outside and started workin' on his head! For pickin' at me. They saw what it was: breach of the peace. That dude was tryin' to start a riot."
"There's stuff happened in the fifties I don't even talk about. I still don't believe that shit actually happened, and I was one of the parties it happened to! See the South had this thing that no one understood--not even the kids who were growing up in it and who were only going by what the old folks told ëem. The old folks, the Caucasians who were born there, thought they was right. But in the end it was the kids who turned around and taught the parents. During the Hippie generation, they started turning things around, they showed America what we stood for. ëCos I always say, it wasn't no hatred; it was economics, it was the dollar bill, a whole system based on money. Because if it was hate, man, black people could've poisoned the world, ëcos they was in all the kitchens!"
"But today the South has got its act together, and it's beautiful, baby. See, I choose to live in the South. I like the Southern states; I like the South, the warm climate. I've lived in Florida longer than any other place exceptin' Chicago. Man, I just like this part of the country. It's nice, it's quiet, and the people who live around me are beautiful. Right now two towns that I sorta live between are trying to claim me as a resident. And I can be the best neighbor in the world, man. I've played for the schools around here, the Police Athletic League, done prison gigs. When people ask me to do things, they get surprised because I say yes!"
Back in the late fifties, when Chess publicists were cleverly billing him as "Everybody's Beau," Bo's musical innovations and his special beat were widely copied. His first two songs inspired numerous imitations over a period of four or five years. "Willie and the Hand Jive," and other hits by Johnny Otis, borrowed freely from Bo's tremolo effects and his use of maracas and tom-toms. Gene Vincent's "I'm Goin' Home" was a rockabilly equivalent of "Bo Diddley". Bo's own self-imitation, "Momma (Can I Go Out Tonight)", was performed in the movie "Go, Johnny Go," by Jo Ann Campbell, while versions of "Bo Diddley" itself, the fount and source of it all, were done by Jean Dinning on the Essex label, the Harmonicats ("that's what they were, three cats on harmonica!") on Mercury, and--would you believe--by the Joe Reisman Orchestra and Chorus on RCA. Meanwhile, on the blues side, Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" and Etta James's "W-O-M-A-N" were in a sense "answers" to Bo's "I'm a Man."
But one of the most significant Diddley derivations of that time came from a man who, on one occasion at least, experienced the virtual reverse, in racial terms, of some of the negative treatment Bo had encountered in the South. It was August 1957, and Buddy Holly was bringing his newly formed group to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. In general, the year 1957 had proven to be the year for Buddy Holly. That was when the shy youth from West Texas broke out with the distinctive hiccuping singing style on which he balanced such elegantly penned numbers as "Peggy Sue," "That'll Be the Day," and "Oh Boy." But the B-side of the last record was an out-and-out musical clone of "Bo Diddley," a song that went by the name of "Not Fade Away," and that is almost as often covered today as "Bo Diddley" itself (it is a favorite concert segue for the Grateful Dead, for instance).
Indeed, Holly had good reason to be grateful to the Bo Diddley rhythm in general, according to John Goldrosen and John Beecher, authors of Remembering Buddy, the singer's definitive biography.
Holly's group was called the Crickets, a name that carried with it an R and B connotation, and so somewhere along the line, as Goldrosen and Beecher tell it, some promoter got the mistaken impression that Buddy and the boys were an all-black group. Thus, on his first national tour country-boy Buddy Holly found himself scheduled for inclusion on a black package show headlined by Clyde McPhatter and Otis Rush. He would be working, he learned, before exclusively black, inner-city audiences in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Harlem, the last for a now-unheard-of 16 day stint.
One of the Crickets, Niki Sullivan, recalled that their reception in D. C. and Baltimore was highly favorable, but all of this changed in Harlem when they went before the exacting Apollo crowd. "The first day we went on it was a weekday matinee. They opened the curtains and Buddy stepped toward the mike, and there was this large black woman in the front row who said, ëIt'd better sound like the record!' You could have heard a pin drop. And after we got through I don't think five people clapped. The same thing on the evening show, and the next day--nothing. The third day we did our first song and got no response again. Then Buddy turned around and said, ëLet's do "Bo Diddley".' And we went into ëBo Diddley,' cutting up and working our butts off. I was dancing around in a big circle, going through a bunch of gyrations, and Buddy was all over the stage, and Joe B. [Mauldin] was bouncing that bass back and forth, and I've never seen Jerry [Allison] work harder on those damn drums. And when we finished that song, the people just went bananas. From then on we were accepted at the Apollo."
His biographers do not indicate whether Buddy Holly had heard of Bo's triumph at the Apollo some twenty-one months earlier, but Holly certainly appeared to have had a special interest in the music of Bo Diddley, an interest that can be said to have resulted in one of the more bizarre episodes in rock discography.
While working in Clovis, New Mexico, in 1956, just before his meteoric rise to stardom, Holly had committed some of his musical experiments to tape on a store-bought recorder. Among these try-outs were renditions of Chuck Berry's "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," and Bo's "Bo Diddley." The idea was that these could serve as demos if the opportunity ever arose for a record contract, but the cuts were in fact never used for this purpose and sat gathering dust for a while. But Buddy Holly's death in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, at the age of 22, prevented him from ever hearing what became of those tracks, for they were to form a central part of what one newspaper characterized as the "disk-after-death phenomenon," the posthumous Buddy Holly industry.
Even by the standards of Buddy Holly's other posthumous releases, what happened to his "Bo Diddley" track was unusual. Holly's manager, Norman Petty, decided to include the Diddley tune on the Reminiscing album along with other recordings from the Clovis period. In view of the basic nature of the initial recordings it was obvious that some sprucing-up, some light second-tracking, would be required to make the product saleable, but as reported by his biographers, Goldrosen and Beecher, Buddy Holly's "Bo Diddley" underwent a complete transformation. "Most of the lead guitar playing on the released version of ëBo Diddley' was, in fact, not on the original demo. All Buddy had played on his original recording was a lower-pitched tremolo effect similar to Diddley's own playing on the hit version of the song, but on the overdubbed release, a whole new guitar part was added and the other instruments on Holly's original recording were also ëreinforced.'" Jerry Allison, Holly's drummer insists that the changes weren't even necessary. "[It] kind of bugs me. . . all that bad overdubbing," he said.
Diddley fans might well concur with Allison's assessment. Gone was the richness of the original, its broad rhythmic spectrum, its tightness; in its place a stiff, almost wooden rhythm dominates the thin, skinny licks of the overdubbed guitar. Only Buddy Holly's quavering and delicate voice, it seems, saves the piece from total disaster. Nevertheless the Reminiscing album was received well worldwide by Holly's mushrooming legions of fans when it was issued in August, 1962. The added irony is that when Holly's recording of "Bo Diddley" (originally cut 1956, with accretions 1962) was released as a single four months later, it went straight to the #5 position on the de facto integrated charts, and with the more sophisticated marketing methods of the day even outsold Bo's original Chess issue. Who its buyers were--whether posthumous Buddy Holly fans or Bo Diddley sentimentalists--one cannot be sure, but certainly it can be said that neither artist particularly benefited from this curious exercise. Well, Holly's estate did.
"Yeah, that's another one I never saw a dime from," says Bo ruefully, having come to regard these enterprises as less of a compliment that the forces behind them would have record-buyers suppose. "See, my early managers weren't hip to these things, getting paid for covers of my records, or other singers grabbing my style. Or else the money for them just went into their own pockets! There were times when I was totally ripped off. I mean how long can I be 27, 31 years old? What you're accomplishing is your life, and people do this to you? I wish these cats could have stuck to their own act and left mine alone. Each tune represents a whole lotta money, y'understand, and it's been going on ever since. I've got copies of my tunes put out all around the world, and if it hadn't been for my friends overseas I never would have even heard about them."
"The government could've gotten more involved. They could have made the record companies do what they said they were gonna do. If you said you're gonna press 90,000 records, and 20,00 are bad, then they should go into a shredder, not ship ëem overseas for a quick buck. Those duds should be remilled and them made back into vinyl. And the government should be counting all of this with a meter that has a tag on it, like the electric company. If that tag gets tampered with and a government dude come out there and sees that, then that's the company's ass. That'll cost ëem five thousand dollars. That's how it should've been. The government should've monitored these things. I would have welcomed that. I would have welcomed it if the government could have taken care of royalties, taken their part, then given me mine."
"Most black artists weren't protected any in those days. Many times it was tough just to get paid what you were due for a gig." There was surely something prophetic, therefore, when the program for Alan Freed's 1959 Easter Jubilee carried the following unwitting characterization of the promoter-artist relationship in its column-length profile of Bo. "Bo Diddley has appeared professionally only a little over four years, and his climb has been tremendous. Theatre managers, club owners and dance promoters will bear this out as they smile happily at their box office receipts while Bo is busy inside thrilling the throngs that came to hear and see him." (You can almost see the rubbing of hands and the demonic smiles that his statement conjures up).
"In the end," says Bo, "I learned to do what Chuck Berry told me. He said, ëTake the money, Bo, then play!' And Chuck didn't get to be a multi-millionaire for nothin'!"
The year 1959, however, proved to be an auspicious one for Bo. After something of a dip in fortune following the wildfire years of ë55 and ë56, he was back in the charts again with a run of four hits, including one that the eminent rock critic Greil Marcus has called, in benevolent jest, "one of the most ridiculous records ever to enter the Top Twenty." The number in question was "Say Man," a "tune" that consists of nothing but a rhythm track and the sardonic, fun-filled voices of Bo Diddley and Jerome Greene swapping hilarious insults about each other's looks and about their girlfriends and their looks. Bo's final insult--expressed in a phrase that would soon find its way into teen jargon--is that he thinks that Jerome looks like he's been "whupped with an ugly stick." In the end, a "third" voice--Bo in an impersonation of a "spody Dude," a drunk--sides with the Bo figure and agrees that Jerome is truly ugly. But in a quickly pressed follow-up, "Say Man, Back Again," the mediator evens the score when he declares that although he's got nothing to do with it, he finds that "neither one of ëem is good looking."
"Say Man" was not a planned composition. In fact, its very existence was a matter of chance--either that or the fine sense of opportunity possessed by Ron Malo. Malo was a professional recording engineer from Detroit who had been hired by the Chess Company in preparation for their move to expanded quarters at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, the address immortalized in the Rolling Stones' song of that name that recently has been the subject of a spirited community preservation effort. Malo heard Bo and Jerome working up a storm together during a break in a scheduled session, and thinking the result might be fun, he simply let the tape roll. After twenty minutes or so (Bo and Jerome seemed to have had an infinite capacity for both giving and receiving insult), Malo realized that with judicious editing this material could be turned into a promising release. "They took all the dirt out!" quips Bo. The bowdlerized version nevertheless went straight to the #3 spot on Billboard's R & B charts, and reached the #20 position in the "hot 100" column as well, and in so doing started something of a craze in "talking" songs.
In turn, the success of "Say Man" earned Bo the distinction of the full-page cover photo of the October 31 issue of Cashbox, where the caption writer predicted that the record would be Bo's biggest money maker ever and quoted "co-managers," Len Chess and Phil Chess, as claiming they had groomed Bo into becoming "one of their best-selling artists."
More important, perhaps, than the Chesses' self-serving statement, was the cover portrait itself. Bo is captured in one of the classic Diddley poses, as he leans forward with guitar in hand in a prototype of a stage move known as the Diddley Splits. The red and black plaid of his outrageous tartan tuxedo suggest sex and power. He wears an appealing, insinuating half-smile under languid, bedroom eyes. It is a singularly "black" expression, one that he had acquired through years of hard practice in the high Bronzeville art of flirtation and propositioning, and it announced something that was never openly acknowledged: that Bo Diddley the black hipster and inventor of jungle music, was a sex symbol for women of all races. Bo was no Nat King Cole, nor did he have the chiselled good looks of a Chuck Berry, but he did have a sort of Sugar Ray Robinson aura, suave, energetic, and, above all, physical. That he might be attractive to white women was a highly charged possibility for the time, but that attraction was nevertheless a fact, and not even Bo himself fully realized its consequences.
The standard Gretsch that Bo wields in that memorable picture, however, would be seen less and less, for the Hawk was on its way. The Hawk was the name Bo gave to his custom-built oblong guitar, certainly the world's furthermost geometric departure from the shape of the traditional instrument, and without a doubt the mother of all boom boxes. Though he had tried many manufactured guitars, he was never too pleased with them. "I had trouble with the necks. With my big hands, they felt like toothpicks to me. Plus, I always wanted to be different. I always wanted to put my little touch to things. That's the reason I decided to build me a square guitar, because when I jumped on stage, I wanted the people to have something they could talk about."
His daughter, Tanya McDaniel, remembers vividly the birth of the Hawk. "That guitar originated in the basement of our house at 7637 Champlain, in Chicago," she recalls excitedly. "My Dad made it all, so far as the pattern and the shapes were concerned. I remember him cutting it out, seriously, with a jigsaw, with boxes set out on the concrete floor and boards laid across. Everyone at that time was coming out with the wings, and during that time he was driving Cadillacs that had wings also, the 57's and 59's. That's when he went to the square guitar and that's where he's been all the time. He really set out to change the guitar. He had so many beautiful instruments, and with every one of them he kept that unique sound."
"I have the world patent on the square guitar," notes Bo. "If I catch anyone with one like that, then they're in trouble, big trouble! Gretsch made the first professional model to my specifications. They wanted to market my guitars, but they didn't want to spend any money. ëThen there'll be no contract,' I said, and that was that. Now I have my guitars made for me by dudes in Nashville and Australia."
"In all I guess I've had about fifty guitars. I used to change guitars like I change clothes. Many of them I built myself until the electronics got too complicated. I made some with fins, like my rocket-ship model I played the Chicago clubs with. That one got broke up in a motorcycle accident. Then there were leather covered ones, and some covered in carpet, and vari-colored ones, like the ëFunk Machine' I had a few years ago--all psychedelic blue and green and stuff. But most of ëem have gotten legs and walked! I even had a fur covered guitar. That got stolen, too. It looked like mink, but it was rabbit fur. Dude that walked off with that don't even know he walked off with a goddam bunny rabbit!"
While the Hawk may stand eternally as Bo's trademark, many believe that the most pleasing design he created was his Cadillac guitar, first featured on the cover of his 1960 Gunslinger album. The Bo Diddley Cadillac is a curvaceous beauty, slim in body, with a fluid, mellifluous outline, something of a cross between a free form swimming pool and the sculptured lines of a fifties Cadillac. Bo played this guitar continuously throughout the sixties and seventies (see photo section). Today, the Bo Diddley Cadillac is a familiar element in the videos of ZZ Top, being one of the preferred instruments of the guitarist extraordinaire, Billy Gibbons, whose title for Bo is "a Full Professor out of the Blues University."
That Bo could achieve phenomenal effects with the Hawk is demonstrated richly on his third album, Have Guitar, Will Travel (Checker 2874; reissued 1984 as Chess CHC 9187). The album title is a pun, of course, on the catchphrase, "Have Gun, Will Travel," from the highly popular "Palladin" television series that starred Richard Boone. Obviously, the West had a fix on Bo Diddley's imagination. Of the album's eleven tracks, at least seven were recorded on the Hawk in 1959, three of them--"Run Diddley Daddy," "Nursery Rhyme," and "Mumblin' Guitar"--featured scorching guitar work. "Run Diddley Daddy" was Bo's second "monster" song, outstanding for conveying the droll horror and utter breathlessness of Bo as the monster's quarry. "Nursery Rhyme"--sometimes issued under the title "Puttentang"--is a grown-up patting song about a piece of serious business: the time, as Bo explains it, "when Little Brother got a helluva whuppin' for sassin' Momma!" It would be easy to mistake some of the guitar licks on this number for the tolling of bells, so pure and ringing is their tone.
But the standout on this platter is "Mumblin' Guitar," where Bo delivers a stunning display of his improvisational and technical power. He once told writer Bill Millar that he was first inspired to attempt this style after hearing "Space Guitar" by Young John Watson. "The guitar. . . . That's where I picked up that mess. I'm really a rhythm fanatic and Johnny is a ëfinger' man, he's unique with it. Long before I met him, I liked what he was doing but I could never do it myself. I'm still a baby at it ëcos this cat holds a conversation with his axe, he's just unbelievable and can make his guitar call you all kinds of dirty names! He holds the title for talking guitars. . . I'm still trying to learn."
Bo's attempt to paint himself a novice is a conspicuous self-depreciation, for when Bo's guitar talks, people are bound to listen. Straight from the number's opening invocation to "Quit mumblin', man, and talk out loud," Bo's guitar talks of things wondrous and mind-boggling: tall tales, sexual exploits, devastating put-downs, side-splitting gags. It doesn't matter that the guitar takes over, or that none of what it says is exactly decipherable. The result is a masterly piece of rock and roll musicianship, to that time the fullest expression of the Diddley instrumental spirit. No wonder that in the Chess master log this scalding number is provided with the alternative and far more appropriate title of "Cracklin.'"
So Bo ended the decade on a high note, four hits in a row, a new album, and a guitar that talked. But it was his mouth, rather than his guitar, that would have to do the talking to his wife, Toots. She was on the warpath and would be satisfied with no less, it seemed, than Bo Diddley's glossy, black scalp.