If riffs earned royalties, Bo Diddley would have been a black Howard Hughes. The simple syncopation he scratched out on the guitar in his autobiographical record, "Bo Diddley" ("shave and a haircut... two bits"), has become one of the rhythmic cornerstones of rock 'n' roll. Everybody's used it: Buddy Holly in "Not Fade Away," Johnny Otis in "Willie and the Hand Jive," Duane Eddy in "Cannonball," the Who in "Magic Bus," Bruce Springsteen in "She's the One," etc. But instead of overseeing an empire, Bo Diddley has had to be content with the knowledge that he's a "living legend" and one of the fathers of America's national music.

   The Bo Diddley riff actually goes all the way back to West Africa, and the "patted juba" rhythms of pre-slavery days. In the American South, enslaved Africans were denied access to their traditional drums (white slaveholders were afraid of the way blacks used drums for communication), so they patted out the rhythms on their bodies. "Hambone," as it was called, became an Afro-American musical tradition, and its polyrhythmic syncopations affected everything from tap-dancing to cheerleading.

Actually, Diddley wasn't even the first artist to put the heavily accented rhythm on record. That distinction goes to a Chicago youngster named Sammy McGrier, who did the hambone in anamateur show, where he was discovered by bandleader Red Saunders in the early '50s. Saunders recorded Sammy and two other boys as the Hambone Kids, and their "Hambone" became a novelty hit, inspiring cover versions by the duo of Frankie Laine and Jo Stafford, and even Tennessee Ernie Ford!* (see below). One of the Hambone Kids, Dee Clark, went on to use the rhythm in his hit, "Hey Little Girl." But it was Diddley's modernization of the beat that had lasting impact.

   Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in 1928 and was adopted by the McDaniels, a McComb, Vtississippi,share-cropping family who took young Ellas with them when they moved to the South Side of Chicago. His first instrument wasn't a guitar - it was a violin. But he hankered to play a six-string like his idol, John Lee Hooker, so as a Christmas present one year, his step sister gave him a guitar that he'd picked out from a catalog. His mother didn't approve of this new direction, but she was fighting the inevitable.

   Ellas (now nicknamed Bo Diddley) started playing his guitar and passing the hat on the corners of Chicago's Maxwell Street. Soon he was proficient enough to move indoors with a regular gig at the 708 Club, and eventually he became a well-known performer around the South Side. By 1955, Bo was eager to record. He strolled over to Chess Records at 2120 South Michigan Avenue to audition, taking with him a song he'd written called "Uncle John." It had that famous rhythm pattern, which intrigued the Chess Brothers, but the words were too dirty to put on a record. So they told him to rewrite the tune and come back. When he returned, he'd named it after himself - "Bo Diddley." Now it was something the Chess label could use.

   When he went into the Chess studio to do his tune, Bo took his longtime partner, Jerome Green, with him to play the maracas. Bo didn't know anything about recording, but he had a sound in his head that he wanted to recreate, and he told the sound engineer to feed the maracas through an echo chamber. That was it. The heavy reverberation on the snaky percussion was just the strange sound he was after. It "took thirty-five takes to get it right," Bo recalls, but once he got it right it became eternal. It has echoed through rock 'n' roll ever since - in the music of big names like the Rolling Stones and the Animals (whose "Story of Bo Diddley" Bo called "the biggest load of rubbish I ever heard in my life!"), and flashes in the pan like the Strangeloves and Bow-Wow-Wow. With the boastful, macho anthem "I'm a Man" on the flip side, Bo's single was an R&B smash. He continued to record for Chess, both as a sideman (for Chuck Berry and others) and as a headliner, recycling the "Bo Diddlev" rhythm on songs like "Mona" and "Who Do You Love."

   The debt to Bo Diddley can never be repaid, and he knows it. "I opened the door and everybody ran through it," Diddley says. "I was left holding the door knob."

   Note: The name of "The Ol' Pea Picker" (Ford) pops up again in this tale, when Bo appeared on Ed Sullivan's television show. Diddley was actually told at rehearsal to not perform his own hit, "Bo Diddley." Rather, he was instructed to sing Tennessee Ernie's "Sixteen Tons"!  Bo agreed, but live on the air that night, he did what he does best: be and sing "Bo Diddley". Needless to say, this did not sit well with Mr. Sullivan, so Bo blew his primetime network TV debut. But, as always, he made his point.