Bo Diddley is an Essay Topic

You totally need to buy and read this--

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140062238/qid=1113025711/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-4204839-3895845

http://music.msn.com/album/default.aspx?album=40850046

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0394723694/103-4204839-3895845?v=glance

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002IVR/qid=1113026689/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-4204839-3895845

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019506075X/qid=1113026967/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-4204839-3895845

and on Ed Sullivan.

and on Shindig!

All MUSTS for the Bo Diddley Experience.

I am admittedly light on my delta knowledge, but I'm not familiar with other blues artists who are as dependent on percussion/rhythm as Bo is. If there is a direct link from Africa through early American slavery to Bo Diddley, there must be other examples of that sort of beat in the American south.

That beat was totally an african-american thing tho, not Bo's own creation. Here is a track from that Sounds of the South thing that I linked to above. just a random woman doing the hambone that Alan Lomax recorded back in 1959. I mean, not an earth-shaking listen or anything, but it gives some context to what Bo was doing. He was just kind of taking this african-american oral playground tradition and putting THE BADDEST GUITAR SOUND IN THE HISTORY OF MAN behind it.

The paper is going to be a twenty page undergrad thing. Since it's for a history class, I have to cover Bo in a way that points out his relevance to society in general. What he did was incredibly important to the purely musical aspect of rock and roll. What about the rock culture? Is there anyone besides Gene Vincent who was as much of a badass? Was there any musician before him who had the swagger? Like he could rock the guitar and then rock your skull?

Is Bo Diddley the first Rock and Roll badass? Even if Bill Hailey, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly joined forces in a tag-team match, Bo Diddley would kill them.

Is there anything to that, or am I just making stuff up? And, yeah, Chuck might have learned some moves in the joint, but Bo was a boxer.

The Diddley rhythm is basically clave played as if it were a beat, and not (as it actually is) a way to organize music. So it has a strong relationship to Cuba. The whole thing about "African" influence on American music is something to be taken with a huge grain of salt--Cuba is where a lot of the stuff that went into early rock and roll actually originated (and yeah, Cuban music obviously used African influences).

Bo Diddley was far more limited than Berry, Presley or many of the other rock and roll guys of the '50s. Basically the same thing played over and over. That's part of the reason he wasn't as big--he didn't really have any songs, pretty basic shit. I love Bo Diddley, though. As far as being a wild man, certainly someone like Wynonie Harris was pretty crazy. The early rockabillies were pretty nuts, too. So I dunno, saying Bo was more a badass than many another early rocker, I'm not sure that's something you'd wanna say without some strong evidence. Howlin' Wolf was pretty badass; many of the Delta blues guys, ditto...Skip James was a borderline psycopath or at least a sociopath, reputed to have killed at least one person.

On record, he's way more badass than the other four. He makes neckties out of cobras ("Who Do You Love"), The Law is afraid of fucking with him ("Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger"), and when he's done with all that, he'll chill with you in the streets and insult your black ass ("Say Man").

IRL, it's a different story though (like edd said).

is his music from this period worth checking out?

Maybe I could trace the history of the badass figure in early American music up to its incorporation into rock and roll, with an emphasis on Herr Didmeister.

I have an aircheck of Alan Freed playing "Bo Diddley" when it was new and remarking that the song was a hundred years old -- and that "this guy calls himself Bo Diddley." Pretty cool.

Bo may or may not be a badass in the Stagger Lee sense, but wasn't he actually a sheriff or something for a while? He reminds me of my grandfather, who took no mess.

An editor of mine once took Bo on a tour of pawnshops in Richmond, Va., in the mid-'80s.

And sure, he never charted higher than Number 20 pop (with "Say Man"), but the 1996 edition of the Whitburn/Billboard R&B singles book lists him at No. 330 in all-time charters. "Bo Diddley"/"I'm a Man" spent two weeks at No. 1 R&B.

Bo Diddley is an Essay Topic.
No, Bo Diddley is a gunslinger.

I remember when a friend got the local record store to carry the Bo's albums. The record store at first refused, saying they carried pop music and show tunes only (this is the late fifties now in a small and very white town). And then a few weeks later suddenly all his albums were there, staring down from the rack one next to the other, one by one, and he had a lot of them even by then! Bo beeming down, with him smiling and cradling his oblong electric guitar!

Say ... what was the name of that masked man? The young guitar freak fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way and the fairness of play? (I could tell you, but you might not believe me! But I'll give you a trivia clue: He went on to record a song that brought back memories of those yesteryears to me, called "Pay Bo Diddley".)

Ha, have fun with your topic, that's what I always say!
Hey, share your paper with us once it's done!

Anyway, I think I'm moving away from the compare/contrast or 'why doesn't Bo get his due' theses toward a discussion of the larger-than-life outlaw hero in popular song, and how Bo and other rockers adopted the persona of the songs' protagonists. Does that sound even vaguely coherent?

I have a working knowledge of folk song tough guys, but I'll have to do some research to find out whether or not I'm full of shit.

Hell yeah, Gareth! It's some seriously fuzzed-out shit. It's great!

There's a lot of stuff to be found on the internet about Bo, I'm sure you're aware. But in case you have fast connectivity, and time, it's like artistic interaction or something ... free flow of ideas and all that.

Here's one I just found that you might enjoy:

http://www.jzip.org/jzip/archives/000364.html

And the hambone -- killer!

Also, I will obtain the Palmer booklet STAT, and the Deep Blues book, too.

Here's a really nice interview with Billy Boy Arnold touching on his early years with Bo Diddley ... and in setting the record straight for history, maybe a few more mythologies are shaken straight.

http://www.richieunterberger.com/arnold.html

I just made my first connection between the badass song tradition and Bo -- "Cops and Robbers" borrows a line from the Cisco Houston song "Railroad Bill" about a .38 Special on a 44 frame (45 frame, same thing).

my last feeble connections on railroad bill and bad guys and such, just background

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/310981in.html

http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc0.asp?docid=1G1:107489230&dtype=0~0&dinst=&author=Mathews%2C%20Burgin&title=%22Looking%20for%20Railroad%20Bill%22%3A%20on%20the%20trail%20of%20an%20Alabama%20badman.%28Essay%29&date=09/22/2003&refid=ency_botnm

The TNT show was cut up with the TAMI show and put on VHS as Born to Rock. Everybody talks about the TAMI show, which certainly is great, but the 1-2 punch of Ike and Tina/Bo Diddley on TNT is jaw-droppingly great. Bo's segment is so...raunchy. SO raunchy. So so so raunchy, albeit in a rather sophisticated way, haha. I do not want to elaborate as it is better just experienced. Nirvana.

On that note there is some stuff in the David Ritz Etta James book on Bo which claims Diddley shot a bunch of 8mm somewhat-porno featuring a number of our favorite R & B stars. I doubt that is on display in the R N R Hall of Fame.

The TNT show has been broadcast in recent years (in pristine shape) on cable outlets such as AMC.

The Ed Sullivan appearance is located on a few of those history of rock type numbers.

I do not believe the Shindigs have been released publicly, but I have 'em. Great Roadrunner, Can't Judge a Book by its Cover.

Don't bother seeing him live these days, that's for sure. He;'s like a bitter old Borscht belt comic who's decided to go "funk" with an out-of-tune guitar. Go see Link Wray instead (on tour in May). An original rocknroll badass who still delivers the goods even though he's 657 years old.

I saw Bo Diddley last year. He was the final act on this ten group doo-wop nostalgia tour. It seemed pretty degrading. He was sick and did his three songs -- Can't Judge a Book by it's Cover, Shut Up Woman, and Hey Bo Diddley -- sitting down. Even so, he will always stand seven feet tall and five feet wide in my heart.

The performance by Bo and the Duchess in "TNT Show" is indeed amazing (as are the bits by Ray Charles, Ike and Tina, and, surprisingly, the Lovin' Spoonful).

When I say he didn't really have any songs--that's not a value judgement, or a putdown, not in the least. Bo's beyond "songs." Pretty fucking bedrock. "Pretty Thing" is certainly in my top echelon of recorded performances.