Bo Diddley: The Rolling Stone Interview

More on Bo Diddley in Rolling Stone:

• The Indestructible Beat of Bo Diddley by Neil Strauss (RS 981, August 25, 2005)

• The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Bo Diddley by Iggy Pop (RS 946, April 15, 2004)

• Photo Gallery: Shots From Bo Diddley's Five Decade Career


The litany of Bo Diddley's great hits is one of the fundamental incantations of original American rock & roll. From the characteristically self-celebratory "Bo Diddley" in 1955 (which featured "I'm a Man" on the flip) through "Diddy Wah Diddy," "Who Do You Love," "Hey! Bo Diddley," "Mona," "Crackin' Up," "Say Man" (his pop peak: Top Twenty) and into the early Sixties with "Road Runner" and "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover," Bo's music is one of the true wellsprings of rock.

If Bo Diddley were in his artistic prime today, with sharp lawyers and management, he might well be — like so many fey pop youths of the moment — a very wealthy man. Instead, one of the fathers of rock & roll lives in a trailer at the end of a long and bumpy white-sand path deep in the woods around Archer, Florida, about half an hour outside of Gainesville. Pulled up in front of the double-width mobile home is a gold-toned Ford pickup with a brass duck mounted on the hood. Parked off to the side is a long, white '64 Cadillac in some disrepair ("It's an antique," Bo says). A small but clamorous pack of semidomesticated dogs guards the trailer's entrance — souvenirs, like Bo's Aussie-crafted guitars, of his world travels.

Inside, all is tidy. There's a sofa covered with a flower-print quilt, side tables neatly decked with towels and a coat stand topped with a collection of Bo's trademark lids. On the floor are two disconnected TVs and a VCR, all blown out in a recent electrical storm. Nearby lies Bo's guitar case, encrusted with Coors-beer stickers and road mottoes along the lines of "Girls Wanted." The square-bodied Kinman guitar inside is tuned, of course, to an open chord. There is a large Bible, opened to Job, and on the walls a scattering of posters emblazoned with slogans: "Beam Me Up, Scotty, There's No Intelligent Life Down Here." And "If You Think Rock & Roll Started with Elvis, You Don't Know Diddley." Bo's girlfriend, Marilyn, a cheerful, thirty-year-old white woman, sits at a dining table near the kitchen, sipping a Pepsi.

It is still morning, but Bo has been up since daybreak and has just returned from a maintenance visit to the seventy-two-acre piece of property he owns in Hawthorne, about forty miles away. Until recently, he lived there, in an elaborate log cabin, with his second wife, Kay, who is also white. But after some two decades of marriage, they've just divorced, and now Bo has to sell the Hawthorne spread. He's still too pained by the split to say much else about it. He is wearing work pants and a pair of dusty brogans, and his full, graying hair is swept straight back on his head. He seems weary as he takes a seat by Marilyn at the dining table, although whether from his morning's labors in Hawthorne or from the general weight of his fifty-eight years is not clear.

Bo says he lied so much about his age when he was young that he's sometimes forgotten what it actually is. He agrees that he was in fact born on December 30th, 1928, in a house in McComb, Mississippi — deepblues country. His father, about whom he knows little, was a man named Bates. His mother was named Ethel Wilson. She couldn't afford to keep her child, so in a scenario common to rural black life at the time, she placed her eight-month-old son with her first cousin Gussie McDaniel. Thus, says Bo, his full legal name is Ellas Bates McDaniel.