Bo Diddley at the second annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner in 1987.

Editor’s note: Bo Diddley died of heart failure today, according to a statement released by his family.

Tim Lister
Executive Editor

Nine years ago, I was producing a CNN show called ‘World Beat’ – and we had the good fortune to sit down with Bo Diddley. He was about to turn seventy but still had extraordinary vigor and a busy touring schedule. He also had opinions.

It wasn’t difficult to get him started. All you had to do was suggest: “Some people think Elvis Presley founded Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Diddley’s response was immediate and unequivocal: “You ask Chuck Berry, he’ll tell you the same thing. Ask Little Richard, Little Richard will tell you the same thing, ask Fats Domino, any of us. We will tell you that he did not do it and go back in the history books and see if you can find anybody before me. That’s all I gotta say.” Diddley also said he remembered Presley visiting the Apollo Theater in Harlem where he was a regular fixture – “and then [he] ripped off my leg-wriggling.”

Bo Diddley never had the profile of a R & B or Rock ’n’ Roll superstar – but among two generations of musicians he was admired as much as James Brown and Buddy Holly for his creative genius. To the day he died, he felt he never received the recognition he really deserved as one of the pioneers of Rock ‘n’ Roll. “I opened the door for a lot of people,” he once said, “and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.” He said he wasn’t bitter – several times – but he was at the very least resentful.

Diddley really was one of the progenitors of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In the early 1950s he was combining his Mississippi roots with life on the streets of Chicago to produce a unique musical marriage. Its offspring included his debut single, a two-sided offering that paired “Bo Diddley” with “I’m a Man.”

Diddley started off playing the violin – but as his hands got bigger (and because he was also an amateur boxer in his youth!) he turned to the guitar, inspired by John Lee Hooker. He began playing in a Chicago club long before he was 18. “I had to go and sit by the boiler in the back because we wasn’t old enough to be actually in that club,” he told us. And he remembered exactly what he was paid – “eighteen dollars for five shows a night. So musicians have come a long way from back then.”

The “Diddley Beat” was widely admired and imitated – by artists such as Buddy Holly, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards once said: “Watching Bo Diddley was University for me.” At the Beatles’ first news conference in New York in 1964, a reporter asked John Lennon: ”What are you most looking forward to seeing here in America, John?” He replied, ”Bo Diddley.”

Diddley’s electric guitar-playing with its reverb and distortion also laid some of the foundations for funk. When Diddley called his 1966 album “The Originator” he wasn’t exaggerating.

But as artists like Buddy Holly and later the Rolling Stones used the “Diddley Beat” to conjure up hits like “Not Fade Away,” Diddley himself was left with little financial recognition for his contribution to music. Of the record labels he said: “Everybody is getting ripped off because they get the money before you get it. So a half a million dollars come in, they give you fifteen thousand or something like that.”

He did eventually get the recognition he deserved from his peers, being inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 – among the earliest musicians to receive the honor. “This is the top of the hat,” he told CNN at the event “and I’m happy to be here to be sittin’ on the rim.”

When our 1999 interview came to an end, Diddley paused and then summarized his contribution to Rock ‘n’ Roll. “I changed the rhythm patterns of the electric guitar in 1955, and I learned all that stuff in Chicago, my hometown and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I brought rhythm to six strings and with three guys it sounded like twelve.”

Rolling Stone magazine apparently agreed, writing in 2005: “History belongs to the victors and in the annals of Rock ‘n’ Roll, three men have emerged as winners: Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley, a holy trinity who were there at the start.”