Bo Diddley was 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. Bo Diddley came across the beat while trying to play Gene Autry's "(I've Got Spurs That) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle".
http://www.afropop.org/multi/feature/ID/298/Blues+Reflections:+2003
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"); Johnny Otis ("Willie and the Hand Jive");
George Michael ("Faith");
The Strangeloves and
Bow Wow Wow ("
I Want Candy"); Guns N' Roses ("
Mr. Brownstone"); David Bowie ("Panic in Detroit");
The Stooges ("1969"); and
The Pretenders ("Cuban Slide"). 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. After attending a Bo Diddley concert with his father, a young Hartley Peavey, founder of
Peavey Electronics, insisted that his father help him build his own "monster
amplifier" like the one Diddley constructed for his personal use. His self-designed guitars were light-years ahead of anything that was commercially available at the time and included a guitar body recreated to look like that of a 1955
Cadillac tail fin and a fur-covered guitar. Equally integral to the
"Bo Diddley sound" is the fact that Bo Diddley received
violin lessons as a child in his church. He plays the
violin on his mournful
instrumental "The Clock Strikes Twelve", a
12-bar blues, but more importantly, he transferred the violin tuning or
Sebastapol tuning to the guitar. His sound cannot be properly created without tuning the guitar: 1st string
E 329.6; 2nd string
B 246.9; 3rd string
G sharp 207.6; 4th string
E 164.8; 5th string
A 110.0; 6th string
E 82.4
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.
