Hey Bo Diddley: Now He's Gone

Bo Diddley (Elias McDaniels)
December 30, 1928 - June 2, 2008

I have to pause in my political coverage to honor Bo Diddley, who passed away yesterday at the age of 79. I first heard Bo Diddley's music as a young kid, on a rickety mono record player (as we used to call them) in the basement of our house in Chicago. My cousin and I used to dance to his mesmerizing Bo Diddley Beat and jump around crazily without any adults around to make us stop. How did this happen? We were two very young white girls living in a strongly blue-collar neighorhood where Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone and the Everly Brothers were it in that era.

Turns out my Italian Uncle Vito happened to drive a truck for a more than vaguely syndicate-connected outfit (as almost all trucking companies in Chicago were in those days). One of his pickup and delivery stops was at Chicago's famous Chess Records (with its studio at 2120 South Michigan, like the Stones' song of that name, recorded there in 1964). The Chess brothers had a fondness for my Uncle so they used to give him "free samples" of their records and he, in turn, passed them on to us because he certainly had no interest in "colored music," as it was called in that era. Bo Diddley's releases were among them, and we loved them. Who could resist that thumping beat or shouting along with the chant-like words?

Above, Bo's doing one of my favorite songs of his -- Mona -- with Tom Petty at the Fillmore. By the way, the early Stones borrowed a lot from Diddley, including Mick's use of maracas and a cover of Mona that appeared in the U.S. on their album The Rolling Stones, Now.

Bo in the 1966 TNT movie with The Duchess on second guitar

The Stones, along with other British invasion groups, recorded a number of songs at Chess Studios. As young teens, my girlfriends and I got to see the Stones record a bit of Little Red Rooster there. We also got into a recording session with the Yardbirds at Chess, but I can't recall what they were recording anymore.

How did we do it? We had fake press cards printed up saying we wrote for some teen magazine. I'm not kidding. This writing thing started way back then. And yes I admit that, at the time, my friends and I looked very much like the girls in the video from the TNT movie. We did prid ourselves, however, in not being screamers. We were journalists, you know. And we actually did get interviews with a couple of the Brit groups published in Tiger Beat or some such fan mag. Now you know the truth. It's out there.

By the way, Diddley lived in Los Lunas, NM in the 1970s and Denise Tessier at NMI has a nice piece about Bo's New Mexico roots.

I think the world's a little sadder place without Bo's unique, square guitars pounding out the Bo Diddley Beat and hypnotizing everyone in the process, don't you?

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