" Bo Diddley, who died Monday at age 79, was as essential to the creation of rock ?n? roll as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Little Richard, though he seldom got the credit or the accolades showered on his better-known peers.
The singer-guitarist, who died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., had been ill since last year, when he suffered a stroke and later a heart attack. Until then, he had spent most of his life on the road, playing rock ?n? roll, the music he loved and helped invent.
He was a hard-scrabble visionary from the streets of Chicago?s South Side who literally had to fight for everything he got. He created rock ?n? roll?s essential rhythm, pioneered an approach to electric guitar playing that was at least a decade ahead of its time, and developed a vocal style and stage persona that influenced everyone from Elvis to Public Enemy's Chuck D.
"He was a wonderful, original musician who was an enormous force in music and was a big influence on the Rolling Stones," Mick Jagger said. "He was very generous to us in our early years and we learned a lot from him. We will never see his like again."
ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons said Diddley "constructed the sound we all grew to revolve around." And Eric Clapton simply said, "I though he was a genius." "
"But it was Diddley?s feel for rhythm that truly set him apart. His drummer focused on the tom-toms and bass, rarely the snare or the cymbals. Jerome Green?s hypnotic maracas were mixed way out front on the recordings so that they were made to sound unusually full and vibrant. They danced in and out with Diddley?s guitar lines, which were drenched in reverberation. Other percussion instruments also factored into the mixes, all orchestrated by Diddley into rhythms that anticipated the bottom-heavy thunder of heavy metal, the clipped syncopation of funk and the lighter skip of reggae.
The ?Bo Diddley beat? was copied by countless artists and underscored many hits: Buddy Holly used it on ?Not Fade Away,? Presley on ?His Latest Flame? and Johnny Otis on ?Willie and the Hand Jive.? Other artists who incorporated it were Duane Eddy (?Cannonball?), the Strangeloves (?I Want Candy?), the Who (?Magic Bus?), the Stooges (?1969?), David Bowie (?Panic in Detroit?), Bruce Springsteen (?She?s the One?), the Smiths (?How Soon is Now?),
Guns N? Roses (?Mr. Brownstone?) and U2 (?Desire?). His songs were also covered numerous times, by artists such as the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, the Doors, the New York Dolls, Springsteen, Aerosmith, Tom Petty and Bob Seger. The Clash invited him to tour with them at the height of the U.K. punk band?s fame."
http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/06/rock-n-roll-pio.html
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