Bo Diddley, 1928-2008

Bo Diddley is dead.


Bo Diddley was, in some ways, my favorite of the early rock-n-rollers (or my favorite bluesman, depending on how you classify his music. Intellectually, I think his sound, which was very modern, urban and electric for the 50's, places him solidly in the rock-n-roll category, but it feels more like music you'd listen to at a backyard BBQ, so blues. Not that these categories mean anything). I bought thehits collection Bo Diddley's Greatest Sides back in '87. I always associate it with Slim Harpo, whose Best of anthology I bought around the same time, and the hilights of both albums made up most of a 90-minute blues tape I listened to pretty constantly throughout college. When my mom died, I had to suddenly get rid of most of the half of my record collection I had stored at my parents' house, and I remember agonizing over the Bo Diddley album. I decided that I still had the tape, and I could probably find another copy of the album pretty easily. But when I started looking for it, I found lots of "best of" collections that had most of the same songs on them, but not that particular one, and I was so attached to the flow of the first three songs ("Bo Diddley," "You Pretty Thing" and "Bring it to Jerome"), I had to have that exact record. Finally found it on eBay. Gotta love the 21st century!

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