Inspired by a
John Lee Hooker performance, including
Jerome Green, in the Hipsters band, later renamed the Langley Avenue Jive Cats. In the summers of 1943 and 1944, he played at the
Maxwell Street market in a band with
Earl Hooker. By 1951 he was playing on the street with backing from Roosevelt Jackson on
washtub bass and
Jody Williams, who had played harmonica as a boy but took up guitar in his teens after he met Diddley at a talent show, with Diddley teaching him some aspects of playing the instrument, including how to play the bass line. Williams later played lead guitar on "
Who Do You Love?" (1956). with a repertoire influenced by
Louis Jordan, John Lee Hooker, and
Muddy Waters.
Origins of stage name The origin of the stage name Bo Diddley is unclear. McDaniel said his peers gave him the name, which he suspected was an insult.
Diddly is a truncation of
diddly squat, which means "absolutely nothing". Diddley also said that the name first belonged to a singer his adoptive mother knew. Harmonicist
Billy Boy Arnold said that it was a local comedian's name, which
Leonard Chess adopted as McDaniel's stage name and the title of his first single. McDaniel also stated that his school classmates in Chicago gave him the nickname, which he started using when sparring and boxing in the neighborhood with The Little Neighborhood Golden Gloves Bunch. In the 1921 story "Black Death", by
Zora Neale Hurston, Beau Diddely was a womanizer who impregnates a young woman, disavows responsibility, and meets his undoing by the powers of the local
hoodoo man. Hurston submitted it in a contest run by the academic journal
Opportunity in 1925, where it won an honorable mention, but it was never published during her lifetime. A
diddley bow is a homemade single-string instrument that survived in the American
Deep South, especially in Mississippi. Played mainly by children, the diddley bow in its simplest form was made by nailing a length of broom wire to the side of a house, using a rock placed under the string as a movable bridge, and played in the style of a bottleneck guitar, with various objects used as a slider. The apparent consensus among scholars is that the diddley bow is derived from the monochord zithers of central Africa.
Success in the 1950s and 1960s On November 20, 1955, Diddley appeared on the popular television program
The Ed Sullivan Show. According to legend, when someone on the show's staff overheard him casually singing "
Sixteen Tons" in the dressing room, he was asked to perform the song on the show. One of Diddley's later versions of the story was that upon seeing "Bo Diddley" on the cue card, he thought he was to perform both
his self-titled hit single and "Sixteen Tons". Sullivan was furious and banned Diddley from his show, reputedly saying that he would not last six months. Chess Records included Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" on the 1963 album
Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger. Diddley's hit singles continued in the 1950s and 1960s: "
Pretty Thing" (1956), "
Say Man" (1959), and "
You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover" (1962). He also released numerous albums, including
Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger and
Have Guitar, Will Travel. These bolstered his self-invented legend. In 1963, Diddley starred in a UK concert tour with the
Everly Brothers and
Little Richard along with the Rolling Stones (a little-known band at that time). Diddley wrote many songs for himself and also for others. In 1956, he and guitarist Jody Williams co-wrote the pop song "
Love Is Strange", a hit for
Mickey & Sylvia in 1957, reaching number 11 on the chart. Mickey Baker claimed that he (Baker) and Bo Diddley's wife, Ethel Smith, wrote the song. Diddley also wrote "Mama (Can I Go Out)", which was a minor hit for the pioneering rockabilly singer
Jo Ann Campbell, who performed the song in the 1959 rock and roll film
Go Johnny Go. After moving from Chicago to Washington, D.C., Diddley built his first
home recording studio in the basement of his home at 2614 Rhode Island Avenue NE. Frequented by several of Washington, D.C.'s musical luminaries, the studio was the site where he recorded the Checker LP (Checker LP-2977)
Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger. Diddley also produced and recorded several up-and-coming groups from the Washington, D.C. area. One of the first groups he recorded was local doo-wop group the Marquees, featuring
Marvin Gaye and baritone-bass Chester Simmons, who moonlighted as Diddley's chauffeur. The Marquees appeared in talent shows at the
Lincoln Theatre, and Diddley, impressed by their smooth vocal delivery, let them rehearse in his studio. Diddley got the Marquees signed to
Columbia subsidiary label
OKeh Records after unsuccessfully attempting to get them a contract with his own label,
Chess. but it failed to become a hit. Diddley persuaded
Moonglows founder and backing vocalist
Harvey Fuqua to hire Gaye. Gaye joined the Moonglows as first tenor; the group then moved to Detroit with the hope of signing with
Motown Records Later years In early 1971, writer-musician Michael Lydon, a founding editor of
Rolling Stone, conducted a lengthy, rambling interview of Diddley, at his then home in the San Fernando Valley, California. Lydon described him as a "protean genius" whose songs were "hymns to himself", and led the published piece with a Diddley quote: "Everything I know I taught myself." Over the decades, Diddley's performing venues ranged from intimate clubs to stadiums. On March 25, 1972, he played with the
Grateful Dead at the
Academy of Music in New York City. The Grateful Dead released part of this concert as
Volume 30 of the band's concert album series, ''
Dick's Picks. Also in the early 1970s, the soundtrack of the ground-breaking animated film Fritz the Cat'' contained his song "Bo Diddley", in which a crow dances and
finger-pops to the track. Diddley spent some years in
New Mexico, living in
Los Lunas from 1971 to 1978, while continuing his musical career. He served for two and a half years as a deputy sheriff in the
Valencia County Citizens' Patrol; during that time he purchased and donated three highway-patrol pursuit cars. In the late 1970s, he left Los Lunas and moved to
Hawthorne,
Florida, where he lived on a large estate in a custom-made log cabin, which he helped to build. For the remainder of his life he divided his time between
Albuquerque and Florida, living the last 13 years of his life in
Archer, Florida, a small farming town near
Gainesville. In 1979, he appeared as an opening act for
the Clash on their US tour. In 1983, he made a cameo appearance as a Philadelphia pawn shop owner in the comedy film
Trading Places. He also appeared in
George Thorogood's music video for the song "Bad to the Bone," portraying a guitar-slinging pool shark. In 1985, he appeared on
George Thorogood's set, alongside fellow blues legend
Albert Collins, on the
Live Aid American stage to perform Thorogood's popular cover of Diddley's song
Who Do You Love?". In 1989, Diddley and his management company, Talent Source, entered into a licensing with the sportswear brand, Nike. The Wieden & Kennedy-produced commercial in the "
Bo Knows" campaign teamed Diddley with dual sportsman
Bo Jackson. The agreement ended in 1991, but in 1999, a T-shirt of Diddley's image and "You don't know diddley" slogan was purchased in a Gainesville, Florida, sports apparel store. Diddley felt that Nike should not continue to use the slogan or his likeness and fought Nike over the copyright infringement. Despite the fact that lawyers for both parties could not come to a renewed legal arrangement, Nike allegedly continued marketing the apparel and ignored cease-and-desist orders, and a lawsuit was filed on Diddley's behalf, in Manhattan Federal Court. Diddley played a blues and rock musician named Axman in the 1990 comedy film
Rockula, directed by
Luca Bercovici and starring
Dean Cameron. In
Legends of Guitar (filmed live in Spain in 1991), Diddley performed with Steve Cropper,
B.B. King,
Les Paul,
Albert Collins, and
George Benson, among others. He joined the Rolling Stones on their 1994 concert broadcast of
Voodoo Lounge, performing "
Who Do You Love?" at Joe Robbie Stadium, in Miami. In 1996, he released
A Man Amongst Men, his first major-label album (and his final studio album) with guest artists like Keith Richards, Ron Wood and
The Shirelles. The album earned a Grammy Award nomination in 1997 for the Best Contemporary Blues Album category. In an interview with Holger Petersen, on
Saturday Night Blues on
CBC Radio in the fall of 2006, he commented on racism in the music industry establishment during his early career. Diddley sold the rights to his songs early on, and until 1989 he received no
royalties from the most successful part of his career. His final guitar performance on a studio album was with the
New York Dolls on their 2006 album
One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. He contributed guitar work to the song "Seventeen", which was included as a bonus track on the limited-edition version of the disc. In May 2007, Diddley suffered a stroke after a concert the previous day in
Council Bluffs, Iowa. Nonetheless, he delivered an energetic performance to an enthusiastic crowd. A few months later he had a heart attack. While recovering, Diddley came back to his hometown of McComb, Mississippi, in early November 2007, for the unveiling of a plaque devoted to him on the
Mississippi Blues Trail. This marked his achievements and noted that he was "acclaimed as a founder of rock-and-roll." He was not supposed to perform, but as he listened to the music of local musician Jesse Robinson, who sang a song written for this occasion, Robinson sensed that Diddley wanted to perform and handed him a microphone, the only time that he performed publicly after his stroke. == Personal life ==