Artist: Bo Diddley
Genre(s):
Rock
Jazz
R&B: Soul
Retro
Blues
Discography:
Bo Diddley Rides Again-Bo Diddley in the Spotlight
Year: 2002
Tracks: 24
His Best : The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection
Year: 1997
Tracks: 20
A Man Amongst Men
Year: 1996
Tracks: 10
Gold Collection
Year: 1995
Tracks: 14
The Chess Box
Year: 1990
Tracks: 45
Go Bo Diddley
Year: 1986
Tracks: 12
The 20th Anniversary Of Rock 'N' Roll
Year: 1976
Tracks: 10
500% More Man
Year: 1965
Tracks: 12
Bo Diddley
Year: 1963
Tracks: 11
Signifying Blues
Year:
Tracks: 14
Rare and Well Done
Year:
Tracks: 16
Collection (Boogie Woogie)
Year:
Tracks: 2
Bo's Guitar
Year:
Tracks: 1
Bo Diddley and Muddy Watters
Year:
Tracks: 14
He only had a few hits in the fifties and early '60s, only as Bo Diddley sang, "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover." You can't pass judgment an artist by his chart success, either, and Diddley produced greater and more influential music than all but a handful of the best early bikers. The Bo Diddley beat -- bomp, ba-bomp-bomp, bomp-bomp -- is nonpareil of rock & roll's basics rhythms, showing up in the work of Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, and even pop-garage knock-offs like the Strangeloves' 1965 hit "I Want Candy." Diddley's hypnotic rhythmical attack and large, boasting vocals stretched back as far as Africa for their roots, and looked as far into the future as rap. His stylemark nonnatural vibrating, blurred guitar style did much to extend the instrument's office and chain. But even more authoritative, Bo's bounce was playfulness and overwhelmingly rocking, with a wisecracking, jiving tone that epitomized stone & roll at its most humorously off-the-wall and devil-may-care.
Earlier pickings up blue devils and R&B, Diddley had actually studied classical violin, only shifted gears after hearing John Lee Hooker. In the early '50s, he began acting with his longtime partner, maraca instrumentalist Jerome Green, to catch what Bo's called "that consignment groom reasoned." Billy Boy Arnold, a fine vapours harmonica player and isaac Bashevis Singer in his have right, was too playing with Diddley when the guitar player got a consider with Chess in the mid-'50s (after being turned down by match Chicago label Vee-Jay). His very first single, "Bo Diddley"/"I'm a Man" (1955), was a double-sided ogre. The A-side was squiffy with futurist waves of tremolo guitar, set to an ageless greenhouse rhyme; the flip was a bump-and-grind, harmonica-driven mix, based about a annihilating blues riffian. But the solvent was non exactly vapours, or even straight R&B, but a new kind of guitar-based rock & roll, wet in the blue devils and R&B, but undischarged allegiance to neither.
Diddlyshit was never a top vender on the order of his Chess rival Chuck Berry, but o'er the succeeding half-dozen or so old age, he'd grow a catalog of classics that rival Berry's in timbre. "You Don't Love Me," "Diddly-shit Daddy," "Pretty Thing," "Diddy Wah Diddy," "World Health Organization Do You Love?," "Mona," "Road Runner," "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover" -- all ar stone-cold standards of early, riff-driven stone & roll at its funkiest. Oddly enough, his merely Top 20 pop come to was an atypical, laughable backward and forward hip-hop between him and Jerome Green, "Say Man," that came about nearly by accident as the pair were casual roughly in the studio.
As a live performer, Diddley was electric, using his trademark square guitars and deformed amplification to produce new sounds that awaited the innovations of '60s guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. In Great Britain, he was venerable as a giant on the order of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The Rolling Stones in particular borrowed a mint from Bo's rhythms and attitude in their early days, although they only officially covered a couple of his tunes, "Anglesea" and "I'm Alright." Other British R&B groups like the Yardbirds, Animals, and Pretty Things as well covered Diddley standards in their early years. Buddy Holly covered "Bo Diddley" and put-upon a modified Bo Diddley beat on "Non Fade Away"; when the Stones gave the song the full-on Bo treatment (complete with shaking maracas), the solvent was their number one full-grown British attain.
The British Invasion helped increase the public's sentience of Diddley's importance, and of all time since then he's been a popular live act as. Sadly, though, his life history as a recording artist -- in commercial and artistic price -- was over by the metre the Beatles and Stones attain America. He'd record with on-going and declining frequency, but later 1963, he'd never write or record whatever original material on par with his early classics. Whether he'd fagged his muse, or just felt he could sea-coast on his honor, is unvoiced to order. But he remains a life-sustaining function of the corporate stone & roll consciousness, occasionally reaching wider visibility via a 1979 term of enlistment with the Clash, a cameo character in the film Trading Places, a late-'80s go with Ronnie Wood, and a 1989 television commercial for sports place with headliner jock Bo Jackson.
