Bo Diddley dies at 79
Guitar legend killed by heart failure
02 June 2008 - He was the one man to have a rhythm named
after him, “The Bo Diddley Beat”, but at the age of 79, the guitar
legend has died.
The rock 'n' roll pioneer, famed for his homemade square guitar,
suffered a stroke in May 2007 while touring, which was followed
by a heart attack in August the same year.
Doctors say he died from heart failure, and a family spokesperson revealed he
passed away in Florida, surrounded by family and friends.
As a contemporary of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley was
admired by many, and inspired many, including Richard Hawley:
“It's always upsetting when you hear one of the greats has passed away, ‘cos
it kind of takes us away from the source of what makes great music, and I just
hope people keep on listening to Bo Diddley for a thousand years.
"Musicians will inevitably gravitate towards the source of the river, to the
mountain top, and that's where Bo Diddley was.”
Bo once summed up his passion for music by explaining how he tackles his approach
to music:
“I'm into playing chords and stuff like that, I'm a rhythm fanatic, I play the
guitar as if I were playing drums.”
Bo Diddley is
best known for the "Bo Diddley beat",
a rumba -like
beat (see clave )
similar to " hambone ",
a style used by street performers who play out the beat by slapping
and patting their arms, legs, chest, and cheeks while chanting
rhymes.
In its simplest form, the Bo Diddley beat can be
counted out as a two-bar phrase: One and two and three
and four and one and two and three and
four and
The bolded counts are the clave rhythm.
The beat has been used by many other artists, notably Elvis
Presley (" His
Latest Flame "); U2 (" Desire "); The
Smiths (" How
Soon Is Now? ", " Rusholme
Ruffians "); Johnnie Otis ("Willie and the Hand Jive"); George
Michael ("Faith"); The
Strangeloves and BowWowWow (" I
Want Candy "); Guns
N' Roses (" Mr.
Brownstone "); David
Bowie ("Panic in Detroit") and The
Stooges ("1969"). The early Rolling
Stones sound was strongly associated with their versions of " Not
Fade Away " and "I Need You Baby (Mona)". | |
In
his own recordings, Bo Diddley used a variety of rhythms, however,
from straight back
beat to pop ballad style, frequently with maracas by Jerome
Green . He was also an extremely influential guitar player,
instigating the use of many special effects that would prove essential
to rock-n-roll such as auto-tremolo , reverb as
used by The Doors , echo popularized
in surf-rock , distortion used
by Jimi Hendrix ,
as well as other innovations in tone and attack such as string
scratching , a sound produced by dragging the guitar pick the
length of the guitar string as heard in the song " Road
Runner ". Before the invention of the stage
monitor , Bo Diddley built his own double-sided speaker cabinets,
which allowed musicians on stage to hear the sound that was projected
to the audience.
Rhythm is
important in Bo Diddley's music but harmony is
also important and exercised through chord
voicing and chord
inversion , often mimicking choral voicing such as those heard
in African-American
gospel music. In the song " Bo Diddley " he mimics the "chugging" sound
of a train by playing an unfretted, or "open", hand muted E Major
while the chord transition of E Major (fret 12) to D Major (fret
10) mimics the sound of a train whistle. Songs like "Who Do You Love?" are
seen as the precursor to heavy
metal and punk
rock and often have no chord changes;
that is, the musicians play the same chord throughout the piece,
so that excitement is created by the rhythm, rather than by harmonic
tension and release.
Source: Wikipedia
|
