Obituary | Rock pioneer Bo Diddley dies at 79

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, Mr. Diddley -- along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others -- helped reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building it on the templates of blues, southern gospel and rhythm and blues. His original style of R&B 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' "Willie and the Hand Jive," Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," 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 wrangled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from his 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 said in 2003.

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 his mother's first cousin, Gussie McDaniel, who had three children of her own. After the death of her husband, McDaniel 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 eventually enrolled in a 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 with friends.

In 1954, Mr. Diddley and his friends made a demonstration recording. Phil and Leonard Chess, of Chess records, liked the demo, especially the 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 their soon-to-be producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name, Arnold said, described a "bowlegged guy, a comical-looking guy."

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 door -- is called a Diddley Bow (sometimes spelled Diddlie Bow). By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one.

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 chart.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at the age of 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel "Tootsie" 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 and laws against racial 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.

Since the early '80s, Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, owning 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse. In 1992, he married Sylia Paiz, who became his fourth wife.

His survivors also include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel, as well as 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 Iowa on May 13, he had a stroke. Last Aug. 28, he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.