Return To 50’s Main Menu Recording Artists Of The 50s
BO DIDDLEY
“SAY MAN”
(Elias “Bo Dlddley” McDaniel)
Checker 931
No. 20 October l6, 1959
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Bo Diddley, the legendary “Black Gladiator,” was born Elias Bates in McComb, Mississippi, on
December 30, 1928. He was raised by his mother, a hard-core Baptist, and her cousin, Gussie
McDaniel, who actually adopted him and gave him the “McDaniel” surname. The family moved to
Chicago in 1935, where Bo started his musical training under the close watch of O.W. Frederick,
music director of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Frederick taught him violin; a fellow pupil grew
up to be jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins.
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“I used to play all this funny music like Tchaikovsky,” Bo confessed in an exclusive interview, “I
wanted to play some jazz and get down, and everybody else is playing ‘Drink to Me Only With Thine
Eyes’! I found out later that I couldn’t play blues. I could not play like Muddy Waters–l wanted to,
but I just couldn’t. I was cut out to be what l am, Bo Diddley.”
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At some point in the early ’40s, Elias picked up a cheap guitar and his nickname. He worked as an
elevator operator, made circuit boards, drove a truck. and fought several bouts as a semi-pro boxer.
All the while, Diddley and his band, the Langley Avenue Jive Cats (later renamed the Hipsters),
played dives with names like the Sawdust Trail and Castle Rock; they also played street corners and
passed the hat around. “We had a washboard and a guitar, and I was the man with the guitar.
Roosevelt Jackson played the washtub, and Jerome Green [d. early ’60s,”probably from alcohol”]
shook the maracas, though he eould play some tuba, too.”
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After a failed audition at VeeJay Records, Bo tried Chicago’s Chess/Checker label. “I just walked in
there one day and asked [label owners Phil and Leonard Chess] if they were makin’ records. They
told me, ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ I said, ‘I wanna make a record.’ They listened and liked this song,
‘Uncle John’… They had me change the words, and that became my first record–‘Bo Diddley’ (R&B: #I,
1955) b/w ‘I’m a Man’ (R&B: #1).”‘