Remembering Bo Diddley

George Thorogood: “No artist has fascinated me more than Bo Diddley. When I got into his stuff, everybody in 1967 was listening to two monumental rock history albums—one was [Jimi Hendrix’s] ‘Are You Experienced?,’ the other was [the Beatles’] ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ But I had this album, Bo Diddley’s ‘16 All-Time Greatest Hits.’ I’d go to Wildwood, N.J., and buy maracas by the pound because I was fascinated with this sound and this thing that was Bo Diddley. This was before I got into John Lee Hooker, and I was amazed by the sound of this guy who sat on one chord, maybe two. But, like James Brown, he could do one chord for 15 minutes and it never gets boring. That’s where I learned my whole routine from. I mean, what is ‘Bad to the Bone’ except, really, Bo Diddley?”

Todd Snider: There are four important things about Bo Diddley that I hope everybody knows. The first, of course, is that he invented a beat. Second, and less known, his song ‘Bo Diddley’ was a first in that his name was the title and chorus which, in my opinion, makes him one of the inventors of rap. Third, three months before Elvis Presley played [on] Ed Sullivan, Bo Diddley did. He was told to play a different song than ‘Bo Diddley’ and said he would, but when the cameras rolled he played ‘Bo Diddley,’ thus inventing rock’n’roll’s attitude. Fourth and most important, he was so sexy that he told Arlene he had a chimney made out of human skulls—and she still went for a walk with him.”

Billy Corgan (the Smashing Pumpkins): “His influence is tough to quantify. Most people point to the ‘Bo Diddley beat’ as if that alone was enough, but that in many ways severely underestimates what he brought to the table. What he really did was bring a rock’n’roll attitude to rhythm and blues, and that influence is everywhere. Imagine the Stones without the influence of Diddley’s swagger, and you can see his true impact. His prime, like Chuck Berry’s, was at a time when African-American artists playing rock’n’roll was more comfortably accepted by a white public if these men were playing nonthreatening observers whose commentary came through in riddles and encoded language. The hipsters picked up on the fact that they were being spoken to. The sad part of that now is it can lock these men’s brilliance in an archetype no longer appreciated fully when set against the brash, shameless confessional monologues of rap. I never thought much of Bo Diddley till I got his boxed set in the early ’90s, and I found certain songs struck me like Escher drawings in that the more I heard them the more I saw. His is the kind of music that in its primitive urgency never gets old and in its lyrical narrative will never become outdated.”