Bo Diddley

In the 1950s, Bo Diddley helped reshape popular music worldwide as a founder of rock 'n' roll, and his original rhythm and blues style influenced generations of musicians through a distinctive syncopated beat also known as hambone or shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits. Born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Mississippi, he was reared mainly by Gussie McDaniel, a first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson, and after the death of McDaniel's husband, the family moved to Chicago, where his name was legally changed to Ellas B. McDaniel and he resettled on the South Side at age 6. He later recalled a youth of school, church, trouble with street toughs, and violin playing in band and orchestra, studying classical violin from ages 7 to 15 and beginning guitar at 12. He started performing with Roosevelt Jackson, then with Jody Williams and Billy Boy Arnold, in a group first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, which played at the Maxwell Street open-air market and was sometimes joined by Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman for the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a sand-sprinkled wooden board. Unable at first to make a living with the group, he worked at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company, as an elevator operator, and as a meat packer, and he also took up boxing in hopes of turning professional. In 1954, he made a demo recording with a band that included Jerome Green on maracas, and Chess Records, drawn especially to his tremolo guitar sound, encouraged the group to return. With a new stage name taken from a new song, he released "Bo Diddley" as the A side of his first single in 1955 on Checker, a Chess subsidiary; it reached number 2 on the Billboard singles chart, and from 1958 to 1963 Checker released 11 full-length albums by him.

McComb, Mississippi · United States