Bo Diddley Bo Diddley (LP)

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catalog number: SLP5443
weight in Kg 0.28

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(Sundazed) 12 tracks, 1957 Essential' Essential. It's tempting to say that Bo Diddley... more

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Bo Diddley: Bo Diddley (LP)

(Sundazed) 12 tracks, 1957

Essential' Essential. It's tempting to say that Bo Diddley recorded 11 full-length albums, each one better than the last; but that would be denying the pure, unsurpassed genius of his first, Bo Diddley.

Music historians have wasted so many perfectly good words trying to explain the significance of Bo Diddley. "Bo Diddley liberated the blues from the 12-bar form and melded it to an insistent, infectious rhumba beat," they bleat. "Diddley was the progenitor of all that was to come in the evolution of rock and roll," blah blah blah blah.

Listen: Why is eating a plateful of ribs and dripping all over your hands and clothes fun' Because It Just Is. Why is walking around with cotton candy in one hand and a blue, helium-filled balloon on a string in the other fun' Because It Just Is. Bo Diddley is fun Because He Just Is. Bo Diddley (the album) was rock and roll's Big Bang, dripping with sinew and grease and humor and understated swagger. The simplest ingredients - a guitar, a drum, and some maracas - were packed in a gunny sack and slung over the shoulder of some smiling guy with a slick process and a wild plaid jacket, who took it and ran headfirst into oncoming traffic. Reckless, yet crazy cool. He made it sound easy. Geniuses can do that.No doctoral thesis will explain Bo Diddley, the man or "Bo Diddley," the album. You won't find the answer in some scholarly article called The Epistomological Roots of "Diddy Wah Diddy" or something like that, in your dog-eared copy of the Journal of the American Institute of Ethnomusicology.

Article properties: Bo Diddley: Bo Diddley (LP)

Interpret: Bo Diddley
Album titlle: Bo Diddley (LP)
Genre Rock'n'Roll
Price code VLP2
Geschwindigkeit 33 U/min
Vinyl record size LP (12 Inch)
Record Grading Mint (M)
Sleeve Grading Mint (M)
Vinyl weight 180g Vinyl
Label Sundazed Records
Artikelart LP
EAN: 0090771544315
weight in Kg 0.28

Diddley, Bo - Bo Diddley (LP) LP 1
01	Bo diddley	Bo Diddley
02	I'm a man	Bo Diddley
03	Bring it to jerome	Bo Diddley
04	Before you accuse me	Bo Diddley
05	Hey' bo diddley	Bo Diddley
06	Dearest darling	Bo Diddley
07	Hush your mouth	Bo Diddley
08	"say boss man"	Bo Diddley
09	"diddley daddy"	Bo Diddley
10	"diddy wah diddey"	Bo Diddley
11	Who do you love	Bo Diddley
12	Pretty thing	Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley He may not have invented the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm synonymous with his... more

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"Bo Diddley"

Bo Diddley

He may not have invented the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm synonymous with his name. But Bo Diddley and his beat were a primary factor in the development of rock 'n' roll. Bo’s seminal recordings for Chicago’s Checker Records came rooted in blues and slathered in savage tremolo-enriched guitar, reverberating with a tribal thunder harking back to African tradition.

"I had no influences when I first started," claimed the late Diddley. "I didn’t have nobody to copy after, because I couldn’t play blues, and I could not play like Muddy Waters. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. I was cut out to be what I am."

He was born Ellas Bates on December 30, 1928 in McComb, Mississippi. "Chicago is like home to me," he said. "I don’t know too much about Mississippi." Young Ellas was reared by his mother’s first cousin Gussie McDaniel, accounting for his commonly cited surname. In 1934, they headed for Chicago’s South Side. When he was 12, his sister bought him a guitar for Christmas, and his future was assured.

Ellas formed his first band, the Hipsters, in 1946. "I used to play on the street corners," he said. "We had a washtub and a guitar, and I was the dude with the guitar. I had a fellow named Roosevelt Jackson that played the washtub." They soon added guitarist Jody Williams. "We all kind of grew up together," said Bo. "I was a little bit older than all the rest of ‘em." Harpist Billy Boy Arnold joined the group in 1951. "I met Bo Diddley when I was 15 years old," says Arnold. "We were playing together on the street corners." Maracas shaker Jerome Green came in along the way. In early 1955, the guitarist worked up two songs to serve as a demo. "Bo had a home recorder, and we made a little dub," says Arnold. "We wound up at Chess, and Chess was where it happened."

"I just walked in there one day, man, and just asked ‘em if they was makin’ records," said Bo. "They told me, ‘Yeah, what did I want?’ I said I wanted to make a record. So they made one on me." Phil Chess was so impressed that he asked Bo back the next day to audition for brother Leonard. "He had this particular style of his own," said the late Willie Dixon. "A new style was a great thing. We was often wondering whether it would go over or not. But he had that thing ‘I’m A Man.’"

"About three or four days later," says Arnold, "we were in Universal Studios recording the smash hit ‘Bo Diddley’ and ‘I’m A Man.’" That was on March 2, 1955. Bo, Billy Boy, and Jerome were joined by drummer Clifton James and bassist Dixon. Bo had reworked his ribald Uncle John into Bo Diddley, which would prove an R&B chart-topper. The swaggering blues flip I’m A Man was a hit in its own right.

"Muddy was the basic foundation for that song," Bo admitted. "It was actually saying something back, you dig?"

"We thought the record was going to come out as Ellas McDaniel & the Hipsters, ‘cause that was our name," says Arnold. "When the record came out two weeks later, I was surprised. It was ‘Bo Diddley’ by Bo Diddley." It’s a safe bet that Bo’s dangerous Africanized beat would have never passed muster with a major label, at least in the pure, raw form it appears in here; it took visionaries like the Chess brothers to recognize his genius. Muddy took immediate notice, cooking up Manish Boy and enjoying his own Chess hit. "Bo Diddley, he was tracking me down with my beat when he made ‘I’m A Man.’ That’s from ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ Then I got on it with ‘Manish Boy’ and just drove him out of my way," said Muddy. With Eric Clapton on guitar, The Yardbirds cut a driving ‘64 version.

Though Billy Boy claims Diddley’s stage moniker stemmed from a comic they saw at the Indiana Theater, Bo explained its murky origins this way: "Ellas McDaniel is not commercial. But somebody named Bo Diddley—everybody says, ‘What? Who in the heck would be named that?’ But the kids named me that when I was going to grammar school here. Don’t ask me what it means, ‘cause I don’t know!"

Bill Dahl
Chicago, Illinois

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