Ellas Bates McDaniel, known to the world as Bo Diddley, was born on this date in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi.
Raised on Chicago’s South Side after being adopted by his cousin Gussie McDaniel, Diddley was immersed early in church music. He studied violin and trombone at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church but gravitated toward the guitar after hearing the euphoric rhythms of nearby Pentecostal services.
“Everything I know I taught myself,” he later said. Those church rhythms, he explained, fed directly into the trance-like pulse that defined his sound.
Diddley began playing on street corners and at the Maxwell Street market in the 1940s, sharpening his style alongside musicians such as Earl Hooker. Inspired by John Lee Hooker, he blended blues with African-derived rhythms, most famously a five-accent hambone pattern that became known as the Bo Diddley beat. His sound would go on to inspire many popular artists, from Buddy Holly and the Rolling Stones to the Clash.
His breakthrough came in 1955 when Chess Records released “Bo Diddley,” a song driven by maracas, tremolo-soaked guitar and his signature beat, topping the R&B charts. Other hits followed, including “Pretty Thing,” “Say Man,” and “You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover.”
Diddley would cross over to the mainstream, and he would appear on television, tour the U.S. and Britain and write or co-write songs recorded by others, including “Love Is Strange.” In Washington, D.C., he built a home studio that helped launch the careers of young talent such as Marvin Gaye.
Diddley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and received multiple lifetime achievement honors. Yet he often spoke about unfair contracts that left him without royalties for years.
Bo Diddley died in 2008 at age 79, but his influence endures. As Mick Jagger said via the Los Angeles Times, “He was a wonderful, original musician who was an enormous force in music.” On this day in 1928, the beat that helped build rock and roll was born.
