[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 127 (Tuesday, September 16, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1806-E1807]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO BO DIDDLEY

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                      Tuesday, September 16, 2003

  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, in tribute to Bo Diddley, one of the true 
pioneers of rock and roll, who has influenced generations, I would like 
to submit the following excerpt from the article entitled ``Pioneer of 
a Beat Is Still Riffing for His Due'' written by Bernard Weinraub for 
the New York Times on February 16, 2003:

                [From the New York Times, Feb. 16, 2003]

             Pioneer of a Beat Is Still Riffing for His Due

                         (By Bernard Weinraub)

       Every morning at 4 a.m., Bo Diddley walks into a ramshackle 
     studio on his 76-acre property outside Gainesville to write 
     music. Several electric guitars are scattered on the floor. 
     The studio, a double-wide trailer, is crammed with recording 
     equipment, a synthesizer and electronic gadgets of obscure 
     types. Piled in every corner are boxes of tapes of Bo Diddley 
     songs never released.
       Mr. Diddley, 74, sat forward on a hard chair and lifted a 
     blond-finished guitar, made for him by a music store in 
     Gainesville. His enormous fingers, wrinkled and strong, 
     grazed the strings. Hooked into an electronic gadget, the 
     strums became the sounds of a small orchestra: strings, 
     chimes, a brassy horn, an organ and a gospel piano, providing 
     a thumping echo of Bo Diddley songs.
       ``I'm still jumping, doing all right,'' he said, grinning. 
     ``I'm just trying to figure out how to stay in the game. 
     America will drop you like a hot potato, I don't care how big 
     you are. You're big one day and the next day, right away, 
     you're a has-been. Just trying to figure it all out. Maybe I 
     just began.''
       Bo Diddley is a musical pioneer who has influenced 
     generations of rockers, and with electrifying stars like 
     Chuck Berry and Little Richard, he reshaped popular music 
     half a century ago. But despite helping build rock's rhythmic 
     foundations, he has never enjoyed quite the success and 
     recognition of his two contemporaries. Last May all three 
     received the first Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) Icon Awards as 
     founders of rock `n' roll. But as a patriarch, Mr. Diddley 
     rivals and in some ways surpasses his two contemporaries.
       Performers as diverse as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Jimi 
     Hendrix, Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen have been inspired 
     by the syncopated Bo Diddley beat--bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp 
     bomp--which has been traced to myriad sources, including the 
     drumbeats of the Yoruba and Kongo cultures. At the Beatles' 
     first American news conference in 1964, a reporter asked John 
     Lennon, ``What are you most looking forward to seeing here in 
     America, John?'' He replied, ``Bo Diddley.''
       Mr. Diddley's uses of the electric guitar, creating special 
     effects like reverb, tremolo and distortion, influenced funk 
     bands in the 1960's and heavy metal groups in the 1970's. His 
     strutting and powerful presence onstage, his sly, 
     wisecracking songs (``Hey, Bo Diddley''), his cocky 
     attitude, jive dialogue, lyrics of sexual prowess (``I'm a 
     Man'') and ritualized bragging predate rap, which 
     sometimes disgusts him with its language.
       ``I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran 
     through and left me holding the knob,'' he said with pride 
     and anger.
       Mr. Diddley is still struggling, still creating, still 
     reinventing his career, even though he released few albums in 
     the 1980's and 1990's. ``Every weekend I'm booked somewhere, 
     someplace,'' he said. ``You got to

[[Page E1807]]

     change, you got to roll with the punches and come up with 
     something new.''
       Mr. Diddley is hardly shy about proclaiming his importance. 
     ``Have I been recognized? No, no, no. Not like I should have 
     been,'' he said. ``Have I been ripped off? Have I seen 
     royalty checks? You bet I've been ripped off.''
       Mr. Diddley's sense of grievance is justified. Like many 
     other musicians of the 1950's, 60's and earlier, white and 
     black, he was exploited by record companies who took care of 
     car payments and home bills but never provided an accounting 
     of record sales. Beyond this, his stature and impact as a 
     composer, arranger, performer, singer and even humorist have 
     been overlooked.

                         Praise From His Peers

       ``Still the most underrated rock 'n' roller of the 
     century,'' Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers once said.
       Robert Santelli, chief executive of the Seattle-based 
     Experience Music Project, the interactive music museum, 
     concurred. ``Bo is the most misunderstood and the least 
     appreciated pioneer of rock 'n' roll,'' he said. ``That 
     beat--that signature Bo Diddley beat--is essential to the 
     rhythm of rock 'n' roll.''
       Mr. Santelli, a former official at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall 
     of Fame in Cleveland, can find it in every tributary of rock. 
     ``You hear it from Springsteen on down--you hear it in the 
     Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds and those first-
     generation British bands,'' he said. ``They were trying to 
     find a balance between black blues and rhythm-and-blues and 
     rock 'n' roll, and Bo Diddley was the living embodiment of 
     that balance.''
       Joe Levy, the music editor of Rolling Stone, says he is 
     undervalued in another way. ``He's still out there, still 
     making music,'' he said. ``Here's this guy who made great 
     records and could still make great records if he was given 
     the chance.''
       Why Mr. Diddley has never quite succeeded on the level of 
     Mr. Berry or Little Richard is in large measure a consequence 
     of the racial thicket that black Rock 'n' roll performers 
     traversed in the 50's and 60's to gain acceptance by a broad 
     white audience.
       Mr. Diddley still speaks of what he calls the most 
     humiliating moment of his life. In 1959, the singer recalled, 
     he and some of his band members, who were black, began 
     swimming in a pool on a scorching day at the Showboat Casino 
     in Las Vegas. As soon as the band members jumped into the 
     pool, the white families in it climbed out. A pool attendant 
     put up a sign that said ``contaminated water,'' he recalled.
       Mr. Berry achieved enduring success partly because 
     adolescent white audiences found his buoyant, somewhat 
     naughty enthusiasm as appealing as black teenagers did. 
     Similarly, Little Richard, in contrast to Mr. Diddley, went 
     out of his way to appeal to white audiences. But even though 
     his original lyrics to ``Tutti-Frutti'' were bluntly sexual, 
     his silver-lame suits, pancake makeup, thick eyeshadow and 
     high, slick processed pompadour gave him a high-camp sexual 
     ambiguity that rendered him unthreatening to white teenagers 
     and parents.
       Bo Diddley never quite conquered the racial divide. As 
     George R. White, author of ``Bo Diddley: Living Legend'' 
     wrote: ``Diddley remained firmly rooted in the ghetto. Both 
     his music and his image were too loud, too raunchy, too black 
     ever to cross over.'' His records were frequently played on 
     jukeboxes and at dances but far less on the radio. Television 
     appearances were rare. There were no movie offers.
       Mr. Diddley was often uncompromising. In his dressing room 
     before a 1955 appearance on ``The Ed Sullivan Show,'' on 
     which he was set to sing ``Bo Diddley,'' Mr. Diddley said 
     that the show's producers asked him to sing Tennessee Ernie 
     Ford's ``Sixteen Tons,'' then a huge hit. Mr. Diddley claimed 
     not to know it, so cue cards were quickly written. Mr. 
     Diddley said he thought he was now to perform two songs, not 
     one, and he began with ``Bo Diddley.'' Later he drawled, 
     ``Man, maybe that was `Sixteen Tons' on those cards, but all 
     I saw was `Bo Diddley.' '' Sullivan was enraged, Mr. Diddley 
     recalled.
       ``He says to me, `You're the first black boy'--that's a 
     quote--`that ever double-crossed me,' '' Mr. Diddley 
     recalled. ``I was ready to fight. I was a dude from the 
     streets of Chicago, and him calling me a black boy was as bad 
     as him saying `nigger.' They pulled me away from him because 
     I was ready to fall on the dude.'' He said Mr. Sullivan told 
     him that he would never work in television again. ``I was 
     scared,'' Mr. Diddley acknowledged.
       The final insult, he said, was that he was told to return 
     his $750 fee for the show.
       In fact, Mr. Diddley's next television appearance was seven 
     years later on ``The Clay Cole Show'' on WPIX-TV in New York. 
     He didn't appear again on a network show for a decade, until 
     he performed on ``Shindig'' on ABC in 1965.
       Mr. Diddley was named Otha Ellas Bates at birth on Dec. 30, 
     1928, in McComb in southwestern Mississippi, a violent civil 
     rights battleground in the 1950's and 60's. His mother, Ethel 
     Wilson, was 15 or 16; he never knew his father, Eugene Bates. 
     His family were sharecroppers; he was raised by his mother's 
     first cousin, Gussie McDaniel. ``In fact, Momma Gussie raised 
     my Momma,'' he said.
       The death of Mrs. McDaniel's husband, Robert, in 1934 and 
     the harshness of the Depression-era rural South led the 
     family to Chicago, where they had relatives.
       In Chicago, destination for so many other Southern blacks, 
     the family changed the boy's name to Ellas Bates McDaniel. 
     Mr. Diddley said he thought Chicago schools wouldn't accept 
     him unless Mrs. McDaniel was seen as his legal guardian.
       Ellas soon showed an an aptitude for music. At 8 he saw a 
     boy playing violin and asked Mrs. McDaniel to buy one. The 
     family was on relief. So their church, the Ebenezer 
     Missionary Baptist Church on the South Side, began a 
     collection, bought him a violin and paid for lessons--50 
     cents each--by a classical teacher, O. W. Frederick. Bo 
     played classical music until he was 15, when he broke a 
     finger. (He can no longer play the violin because his 
     fingers are too thick, the result in part of a short 
     teenage career as an amateur boxer.)
       But more important, the music of the South Side was the 
     blues, thanks to Muddy Waters and many others who had also 
     moved to Chicago from Mississippi.

                            His First Guitar

       Mr. Diddley began playing the drums but yearned to play 
     guitar and sing like his idol, the Mississippi-born John Lee 
     Hooker. Mr. Diddley's stepsister, Lucille, gave him a guitar 
     for Christmas in 1940, when he was about to turn 12.
       Bo taught himself to play, experimenting and duplicating 
     the sound of his bow on the violin by rapidly flicking his 
     pick across the guitar strings. (He also played trombone and 
     the drums in the church band.)
       He did not treat the guitar gently. ``I couldn't play like 
     everyone else,'' he said. ``Guitarists have skinny fingers. I 
     didn't. Look at these. I got meat hooks. Size 12 glove.'' He 
     came to approach the guitar as if it were a drum set, 
     thrusting the music forward. ``I play drum licks on the 
     guitar,'' he said. The result was an unusual sound--later 
     played on his hand-built, exotically shaped guitars--that 
     evolved into a distinctive backbeat, described by music 
     historians as the meter of ``shave-and-a-haircut, two bits.'' 
     In the background he added maracas, which he built from 
     toilet-tank floats, giving the music a Latin texture, and he 
     gave more rhythm to the drum beat. The lyrics were often 
     delivered staccato, adding to the pounding rhythm.
       The Bo Diddley beat can be traced to West Africa via Cuba. 
     It is also firmly rooted in African-American culture. In 
     rural Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, slaves were 
     denied access to traditional drums because slaveholders 
     feared they could be used for communication. So they patted 
     out rhythm on their bodies. This became ``Hambone,'' an 
     African-American musical tradition of stomping and slapping 
     once used by shoeshine men and still affecting tap dance, 
     cheerleading and a host of other disparate pursuits. At the 
     same time, the guitar beat in the rural fields of the South 
     was a common rhythm played by children on homemade single-
     string instruments rooted in Africa called diddley bows.
       And that, of course, was how Bo Diddley got his name.

                          ____________________