Spelled M-A-N

Matthew Guirreire has a theory for what made Bo Diddley so unique.

He was born Ellas Bates in Mississippi, but he grew up in Chicago, the only Northerner among rock's pioneers. Arriving in the city at the tail end of the Great Migration, he absorbed its musical culture, a distinctive distillation of blues, gospel, and jazz: lean, electric, direct. Technologically savvy, he built and customized his own instruments and amplifiers. He applied the same inventive facility to the blues itself.

His Southern counterparts advertised their influences, drawing comforting parallels with familiar genres - Berry's "Maybelline" was a sped-up country-western song; Elvis leavened his blues with country crooning and the pure earnestness of white gospel. But Diddley seemed intent on eliminating any frame of reference except Bo Diddley himself. The elements were all in place on his first, eponymous single: the already austere blues progressions reduced to a single, repeated chord; the smooth, white-noise wash of cymbals replaced with brittle maracas and rumbling tom-toms; his guitar - its boxy body severing even a visual connection to its acoustic ancestor - fitted with a tremolo unit Diddley built out of automobile and alarm-clock parts, producing a radioactive shimmer.

His northern roots probably didn't help in dealing with impresarios, like Ed Sullivan.

His urban brashness hardly smoothed his career path. Elvis won over variety-show gatekeeper Ed Sullivan with Southern politeness and aw-shucks humility; Diddley nearly hit him after a repertoire mix-up caused Sullivan to derisively call Diddley "black boy." "I was ready to fight," Diddley recalled. "I was a dude from the streets of Chicago." He didn't appear on network television for another decade.