Ellas Otha Bates December 30, β June 2, , known professionally as Bo Diddley , was an American guitarist and singer who played a key role in the transition from the blues to rock and roll.
His use of African rhythms and a signature beat , a simple five- accent hambone rhythm , is a cornerstone of hip hop , rock , and pop music. Wilson was only sixteen, and being unable to support a family, she gave her cousin, Gussie McDaniel, [ 17 ] permission to raise her son. After his adoptive father Robert died in , when Diddley was five years old, [ 20 ] Gussie McDaniel moved with him and her three children to the South Side of Chicago; [ 21 ] [ nb 2 ] he later dropped Otha from his name and became Ellas McDaniel.
However, he was more interested in the joyful, rhythmic music he heard at a local Pentecostal Church and took up the guitar; [ 24 ] his first recordings were based on that frenetic church music. Inspired by a John Lee Hooker performance, [ 7 ] Diddley supplemented his income as a carpenter and mechanic by playing on street corners with friends, [ 27 ] including Jerome Green , in the Hipsters band, later renamed the Langley Avenue Jive Cats.
They re-recorded the songs at Universal Recording Corp. The origin of the stage name Bo Diddley is unclear. McDaniel said his peers gave him the name, which he suspected was an insult. 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. In the 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 , 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 , [ 44 ] especially in Mississippi.
