Bo Diddley, Rock And Roll Pioneer, Dead At 79
Bo Diddley, Rock And Roll Pioneer, Dead At 79 (MTV)
Rock-and-roll pioneer Bo Diddley died early Monday morning (June 2), of heart failure, at his home in Archer, Florida. He was 79 years old.Diddley's given name was Ellas McDaniel. He was born in Mississippi but moved as a child to Chicago, where he first learned to play the violin (an instrument to which he returned on "The Clock Strikes Twelve," the B-side of 1959's "Say Man," one of his biggest hits). It was as a guitarist, though, that he began working on the streets of the South Side, and later made his most important contribution to rock music with the pummeling "Bo Diddley beat." This instantly recognizable rhythm figure, drenched in tremolo, was featured on the 1955 single "Bo Diddley," his first release on Chicago's Checker Records. (Checker was a subsidiary of Chess, which helped launch the rock-and-roll era that same year with Chuck Berry's epochal "Maybelline.")