ACCORDING to Bo Diddley, he and he alone is the one true father of the devil's own music, rock'n'roll. What's more, he'll fight his corner with anyone who doubts his word for a second.
Rock history has it that three musicians - Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley - were the holy trinity who were there from the start, in the early 1950s. "Where'd you get that from?" challenges the testy 78-year-old rock legend from his home in Gainesville, Florida. "Is it because Little Richard been running his mouth?"
Diddley insists that the other two are pretenders to the throne. "My record was released six months ahead of Chuck Berry."
Berry confirms in his autobiography that Diddley was already signed to Chess Records in Chicago when he delivered his demo tape to Leonard Chess. "Little Richard came two or three years later, along with Elvis Presley. In other words, I was the first dude out there," Diddley says.
Diddley was the most primitive of those early rock'n'rollers. His few hits in the 1950s and early '60s - Bo Diddley, Who Do You Love, Mona, Diddy Wah Diddy and Not Fade Away - remain the purest African-American rock'n'roll recorded.
He built his reputation on an unmistakeable primal signature beat (bomp-da-bomp da bomp-bomp) that over the years has been emulated by the likes of the Who (Magic Bus), the Smiths (How Soon Is Now?), the Strangeloves (I Want Candy), George Michael (Faith) and the Stooges (1969), to mention only a few.
That beat came by accident, explains the man known as the Originator, whose trademark instrument is a rectangular-bodied guitar nicknamed the Mean Machine. "I heard this song by cowboy singer Gene Autry called I Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle and I was trying to play it and I couldn't play it. I messed around and stumbled upon an extra note. That's where it came from. So I got me a drummer [Clifton James, who died last year] and it all started from there."
In the late '60s a whole generation of blues-loving British groups such as the Yardbirds, the Animals, Manfred Mann and, in particular, the Rolling Stones, took his devastating rock riff and songs to the bank - just as his stream of rhythm and blues hits dried up in the US.
Diddley was the first African-American to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1955. He was banned from further appearances when he defied Sullivan by singing his hit Bo Diddley instead of Tennessee Ernie Ford's song Sixteen Tons. Sullivan called him a coloured boy and Diddley thumped him.
In 1982 he appeared in the Dan Aykroyd-Eddie Murphy movie Trading Places. He has received numerous accolades, including induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Hey! Bo Diddley, a three-part BBC documentary narrated by the Who's Roger Daltrey, was broadcast in Britain in January.
While Chuck Berry and Little Richard have long since given up touring and only rarely perform, Diddley is still going strong. "I ain't near 'bout through," he says.
As a result of an injury two years ago, when he broke two vertebrae in his back getting out of bed ("I'm OK, I'm not jumping around and doing karate kicks. They got me walkin'.") he now performs sitting down. "The diabetes has got me. I wanna warn you now, look after yourself. It's a mess. It's because of the junk I was eating."
Born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, and later adopted by a sharecropping family who changed his name to Ellas B. McDaniel, he learned classical violin for 12 years. At the age of six he was taken to live in Chicago. He was given his first guitar by his sister and was reportedly inspired to become a musician by hearing the blues legend John Lee Hooker stomping his foot and moaning "boom boom boom".
He was nicknamed Bo Diddley by his classmates at grammar school in Chicago. "I haven't the slightest idea where it came from, my man. They just started calling me that." He incorporated the name, probably derived from southern black slang, into his early songs, such as his first double-sided 45, Bo Diddley/I'm A Man and Hey! Bo Diddley, Diddley Daddley and Bo Diddley's a Gunslinger.
Again, Diddley is quick to debunk any story that his style was influenced by the blues or blues players from Chicago. "No, I wasn't influenced by any of them," he declares. "If you notice, I don't sound like any of them. I knew what they were doin', man. I used to play on Maxwell Street, Chicago, with Muddy Waters and all those people. Make yourself $45 or $50 that'd sometimes keep the wolf from the door. But I had to create my own thing."
Another piece of rock'n'roll folklore bites the dust when I ask him if it's true that in September 1963 the Rolling Stones slept on the floor of his hotel room when they opened for him during their first British tour. "No, that didn't happen," he says abruptly. "Somebody wrote another lie, y'know. We worked on the same tour but they weren't in my room on the floor. I was the one who told them they've got something that's gonna last for years - and they're still here, heh heh heh!"
One of the reasons he is still touring after 50 years of music-making is that he needs the money. If he hadn't signed away all his Chess royalties and copyrights in the early '70s, he would be a rich man.
"I didn't get paid before I signed them away. I can't mention any names because I don't want to get dragged into court for sayin' something about somebody. I won't talk about that.
"I think it's a damned shame that I got ripped off like that. There were people back then who were ripping off a lot of people, because we trusted the guys. And they were a bunch of thieves and you couldn't do anything. I couldn't find a guy to be honest with me about the deals I made."
In 1979, at the invitation of Joe Strummer, a bitter Diddley opened several shows for the Clash on their US tour. According to legend, he insisted on being paid in cash every night before he went on stage. He refused to play classics such as Who Do You Love and Not Fade Away because he wasn't going to make somebody else rich.
"Somebody will have a heart and do the right thing by me one day," he says. "I wish somebody would make my mailbox look like there's footballs in it."
