A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Bo Diddley (aka Ellas McDaniel) 1928-2008: Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, ensemble leader, and teacher.
He only had a few hits in the 1950s and early '60s, but as Bo Diddley sang, "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover." You can't judge an artist by his chart success, either, and Diddley produced greater and more influential music than all but a handful of the best early rockers. The Bo Diddley beat -- bomp, ba-bomp-bomp, bomp-bomp -- is one of rock & roll's bedrock rhythms, showing up in the work of Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, and even pop-garage knock-offs like the Strangeloves' 1965 hit "I Want Candy." Diddley's
hypnotic rhythmic attack and declamatory, boasting vocals stretched
back as far as Africa for their roots, and looked as far into the future
as rap. His trademark otherworldly vibrating, fuzzy guitar style did
much to expand the instrument's power and range. But even more
important, Bo's
bounce was fun and irresistibly rocking, with a wisecracking, jiving
tone that epitomized rock & roll at its most humorously outlandish
and freewheeling. Before taking up blues and R&B, Diddley had studied classical violin, but shifted gears after hearing John Lee Hooker. In the early '50s, he began playing with his longtime partner, maraca player Jerome Green, to get what Bo's called "that freight train sound." Billy Boy Arnold, a fine blues harmonica player and singer in his own right, was also playing with Diddley
when the guitarist got a deal with Chess in the mid-'50s (after being
turned down by rival Chicago label Vee-Jay). His very first single, "Bo
Diddley"/"I'm a Man" (1955), was a double-sided monster. The A-side was
soaked with futuristic waves of tremolo guitar, set to an ageless
nursery rhyme; the flip was a bump-and-grind, harmonica-driven shuffle,
based around a devastating blues riff. But the result was not exactly
blues, or even straight R&B, but a new kind of guitar-based rock
& roll, soaked in the blues and R&B, but owing allegiance to
neither. Diddley was never a top seller on the order of his Chess rival Chuck Berry, but over the next half-dozen or so years, he produced a catalog of classics that rival Berry's
in quality. "You Don't Love Me," "Diddley Daddy," "Pretty Thing,"
"Diddy Wah Diddy," "Who Do You Love?," "Mona," "Road Runner," "You Can't
Judge a Book by Its Cover" -- all are stone-cold standards of early,
riff-driven rock & roll at its funkiest. Oddly enough, his only Top
20 pop hit was an atypical, absurd back-and-forth rap between him and Jerome Green, "Say Man," that came about almost by accident as the pair were fooling around in the studio.
As a live performer, Diddley
was galvanizing, using his trademark square guitars and distorted
amplification to produce new sounds that anticipated the innovations of
'60s guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. In Great Britain, he was revered as a giant on the order of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The Rolling Stones in particular borrowed a lot from Bo's
rhythms and attitude in their early days, although they only officially
covered a couple of his tunes, "Mona" and "I'm Alright." Other British
R&B groups like the Yardbirds, Animals, and Pretty Things also covered Diddley standards in their early days. Buddy Holly covered "Bo Diddley" and used a modified Bo Diddley beat on "Not Fade Away"; when the Stones gave the song the full-on Bo treatment (complete with shaking maracas), the result was their first big British hit. The British Invasion helped increase the public's awareness of Diddley's
importance, and ever since then he's been a popular live act. Sadly,
though, his career as a recording artist -- in commercial and artistic
terms -- was over by the time the Beatles and Stones
hit America. He would record with ongoing and declining frequency, but
after 1963, he never wrote or recorded original material on par with his
early classics. Whether he'd spent his muse, or just felt he could
coast on his laurels, is hard to say. But he remains a vital part of the
collective rock & roll consciousness, and occasionally reached
wider visibility via a 1979 tour with the Clash, a cameo role in the film Trading Places, a late-'80s tour with Ronnie Wood, and a 1989 television commercial for sports shoes with star athlete Bo Jackson.
A guitarist so iconic there’s a beat named after him.
Bo Diddley, nicknamed “the Originator” for his role in the transition
from blues to rock and roll, drove music into a new era with his
rollicking rhythms and edgy guitar.
Biography
Bo Diddley broke new ground in rock and roll’s
formative years with his unique guitar work, indelible African rhythms,
inventive songwriting and larger-than-life persona. He will forever be known for popularizing one of the foundational
rhythms of rock and roll: the Bo Diddley beat. He employed it in his
namesake song, “Bo Diddley,” as well as other primal rockers like
“Mona.” This African-based 4/4 rhythm pattern (which goes bomp-bomp-bomp
bomp-bomp) was picked up from Diddley by other artists and has been a
distinctive and recurring element in rock and roll through the decades.
It can be heard on Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” (later covered by the
Rolling Stones), Johnny Otis’ “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the
Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy,” the Who’s “Magic Bus” and Bruce
Springsteen’s “She’s the One,” to name just several songs. Diddley is the author of a body of songs, including “Who Do You
Love?,” “Road Runner,” “Mona,” “Before You Accuse Me” and “I’m a Man,”
that are among the earliest examples of rock and roll rising out of its
source material in rhythm and blues. Diddley married two worlds he knew
well—the Deep South and the streets of Chicago—in his music. Born Ellas
Bates in McComb, Mississippi, Diddley was raised by his mother’s cousin,
Gussie McDaniel, whose surname he legally adopted. The family moved to
Chicago when Diddley was seven. His earliest exposure to music came via
the church. The first instrument he learned to play was the violin,
though hearing John Lee Hooker’s 1949 R&B hit, “Boogie Chillen”
inspired him to pick up the guitar. Diddley claimed that playing the
violin influenced his muted-string, choke-neck style of rhythm guitar—an
early forerunner of funk that can be heard on songs like “Pretty
Thing.” “It’s mixed up with spiritual, sanctified rhythms,” he
explained, “and the feeling I have of making people [want to] shout.” Diddley formed a band called the Hipsters (later the Langley Avenue
Jive Cats) while in high school and landed a regular spot at the 708
Club on Chicago’s South Side in 1951. He signed with the Checker label, a
Chess Records subsidiary, in 1955. Diddley’s earliest records were
contemporaneous with those of labelmate Chuck Berry. His debut single
was a two-sided classic that paired “Bo Diddley” with “I’m a Man.” It
was the first in a string of groundbreaking sides that walked the fine
line between rhythm & blues and rock & roll. Others included
“Diddley Daddy,” “Pretty Thing” and “Road Runner,” which were all Top 20
R&B hits. One of Diddley’s crossover successes came with “Say Man,”
a laugh-filled exchange of jive talk between Diddley and his maraca
player, Jerome Green. Their verbal sparring derived from the
African-American pastime of “signifying" or “doing the dozens” and
foreshadowed the battle rapping of the present day, minus the profanity. Diddley was also an inventor, devising his own tremolo effect and
playing a unique, rectangular “cigar box” guitar that he designed in
1958. His ever-fertile mind also inspired him to set up one of the first
home studios. The prolific singer/guitarist released a string of albums
whose titles—including Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger (1960) and Have Guitar, Will Travel (1960)—bolstered his self-invented legend. Between 1958 and 1963, Checker released eleven full-length albums by Bo Diddley. Two Great Guitars, released in 1964, was jointly credited to Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. A regular at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, Diddley also traveled with the
rock and roll revues of the day. His exemplary touring band
included fellow Chicagoans Jerome Green on bass and maracas, pianist
Otis Spann, Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica and drummer Frank Kirkland.
Diddley retained his iconic status as a rock and roll pioneer, steadily
releasing albums on Checker through the mid-Seventies. Further releases,
such as 1988’s Live at the Ritz (a concert recording with Rolling Stone Ron Wood) and 1996’s A Man Among Men (a
studio album featuring a host of famous guests) came more
intermittently in the ensuing decades. Meanwhile, Diddley continued to
work the live circuit in tireless fashion. He was righteously outspoken
on the subject of underpayment, bad contracts and other ripoffs that
denied many early rock and rollers (himself among them) their due. Inductee: Elias Otha Bates a.k.a. Bo Diddley (guitar, vocals; born December 30, 1928, died June 2, 2008)
Bo Diddley at B.B. King's Blues Club in New York in 2006.Credit
Jeff Christensen/Associated Press
Bo Diddley,
a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his
own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll
itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.
The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.
In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.
His
original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians.
And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes —
became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.
It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,”Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.
Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,”
“Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his
booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with
distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing,
wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They
were both playful and radical.
So
were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large
man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed it
himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.
Mr.
Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes
and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument, sometimes
playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.
Still,
for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of
rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he
could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed
his beat.
“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.
He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall.
In
1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley
open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him
without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said during
the tour.
For
his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical
audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,”
he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to
stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way
it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”
Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana
border. He was reared primarily by Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of
his mother, Esther Wilson. After the death of her husband, Ms.
McDaniel, who had three children of her own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.
He
was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He described
his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and
playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O.
W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church,
where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas studied classical
violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when a family member
gave him an acoustic model.
He
then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as
well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before
graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo
with his friend Roosevelt Jackson,
who played the washtub bass. The group became a trio when they added
another guitarist, Jody Williams, then a quartet when they added a
harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.
The
band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats,
started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were
sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman
because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board
sprinkled with sand.
Mr.
Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the early
days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a
picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator
operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn
professional.
In
1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which
now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess
Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the guitar, a
sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a
promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.
By
Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men who
were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they
were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr.
Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged guy, a
comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his
1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”
That
may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a
certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often
homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a
board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley
had never played one.
Bo Diddley in 1959. Credit
Michael Ochs Archives
In
any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new
song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.”
“Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the
Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard
singles chart.
Mr.
Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” —
three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in
a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The
children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that
goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”
The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A-Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.
Whatever
the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Bo
Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms,
guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged
in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote
for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)
Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan
Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play “Sixteen Tons,” the song
popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he
played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation,
Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr.
Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.
For
decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess
family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book
“Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess,
Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is
all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected
royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final
accounting.
Mr.
Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the
first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model
60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built
something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock
spring.
His
first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the
circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had
built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same
specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”
On
songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch
rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his
early violin playing, he said.
“My
technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he
told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around
easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned
the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create
chords.
As
his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage,
at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second
marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then
moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.
Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala.,
when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named
Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in
short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against
intermarriage.
During
the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy
Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any
women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley
called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a
better position to protect her on the road.
The
early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley
make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby Checker
had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys.
But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks
in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was
regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way
for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.
But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr. Diddley moved to New Mexico
in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los
Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he
continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974.
His
recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with
synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a
performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like
rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
His
last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code
Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording
Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical
importance.
Since
the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near
Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His
passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.
The
last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his
spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors
include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel
and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes; and 15
grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three
great-great-grandchildren.
Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes.
After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a
stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.
Mr.
Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’
roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had
sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.
“I
tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an
interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at
her real good.”
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
