Bo Diddley: Outlaw Hero, 1928-2008

And so Bo Diddley, author of the so-called “Bo Diddley Beat,” one of the foundational figures in rock ‘n’ roll, is dead at age 79. There is a comprehensive obituary here, a fine appreciation by Iggy Pop (written some years ago for Rolling Stone Magazine) here, and a post-mortem tribute to Bo by Dave Alvin, once of The Blasters, here. I cannot add anything substantial to what others have astutely observed about his contributions to American popular music, but I do think that his influence on rock ‘n’ roll is more than simply musical. Although, ironically, he later became a law enforcement official, I think a great part of his allure was his image as an outlaw hero.

Pictured above is the album cover to Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger (Checker, 1960), in which Bo anticipated the black cowboy, and hired sheriff of Rock Ridge, Cleavon Little, in Blazing Saddles (1974) by some fourteen years. (The Count Basie Orchestra, incidentally, was featured in Mel Brooks' film playing jazz in the wide-open desert.) Bo Diddley wasn’t the first black musician to appropriate the iconography of the American West for an album cover—jazz great Sonny Rollins did that, with Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957)—and Herb Jeffries, who once sang with Duke Ellington’s band, had played a black cowboy in the 1930s, in Harlem on the Prairie (1937), Bronze Buckaroo (1938) and Harlem Rides the Range (1939). I choose to think that Bo Diddley saw these films as a kid, later inspiring him to conceive of this album cover.

But if the album cover of Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, as Michael Jarrett observes, associated the jazz musician with the myths of the American West—“the musician as outlaw hero; the music as a movement or push outward” (p. 197)—Bo Diddley appropriated the image of the outlaw hero for a generation of rock ‘n’ roll musicians, and in doing so became an iconic figure of rock 'n' roll, not simply a musical inspiration. Bo Diddley's album was released at the beginning of the 1960s, and during the 1960s, notes Robert Ray, the Radical Left became obsessed with the iconography of the American frontier:

Clothes (jeans, boots, buckskins) and hairstyles (long and unkempt, moustaches) derived from daguerrotypes of nineteenth-century gunfighters; and pop music returned repeatedly to frontier images: The Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow," The Grateful Dead's "Casey Jones," The Band's "Across the Great Divide," James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James," Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary," The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the Eagles' Desperado. (pp. 255-56)

His musical influence on subsequent figures such as Jimi Hendrix is widely acknowledged, but no one has acknowledged his power as an iconic western figure, as one can see by the pictures found on the back cover of the Jimi Hendrix Experience' Smash Hits, released in 1969. While most certainly a foundational figure in rock music terms of his music, perhaps we ought to think of Bo Diddley's influence in inspiring any number of outlaw rockers as well.