When
Bo Diddley died on June 2, you might have heard a story about how
that name came to be.
Billy Boy Arnold, the harmonica player and singer who will be performing with Jody Williams at Mississippi Valley Blues Festival (and who will be receiving the RiverRoad Lifetime Achievement Award), says he knows the real story.
He met Ellas McDaniel - the man who would be Bo - in 1951, spotting him and two other musicians while walking near 63rd and Cottage Grove in Chicago. Billy Boy started playing with McDaniel on street corners on Saturdays.
One day, McDaniel's bass player pointed out a short, bow-legged comedian who used the stage name Bo Diddley.
"That was the funniest word I ever heard in my life," Arnold said. "I just cracked up when I heard that word. ... I'm only 15, so I laughed and laughed and could never get it out of my mind."
Four years later, they were in the studio to lay down some tracks as Ellas McDaniel & the Hipsters. Leonard Chess of Chess Records was pushing the group to come up with new material, and Arnold suggested a lyric based on that funny name: Bo Diddley.
"To our surprise, the record came out: 'Bo Diddley' by Bo Diddley," Arnold said, and a legend was born.
A similar thing happened to Arnold a few years earlier, when a record label gave him the nickname Billy Boy. (His given name is William.) A few years after that, Vee-Jay Records dropped "Arnold" from his name. ("I didn't particularly like it [having his name changed], but what could I do?")
Arnold, obviously, is a great storyteller, a skill that served him well in the half-century-plus that he's performed the blues. In addition to his contributions to the Bo Diddley legacy, his songs "I Wish You Would" and "I Ain't Got You" were covered by the Yardbirds, and he was one of the first Chicago-born practitioners of the blues. When work dried up in Chicago in the late 1960s, Arnold worked as a bus driver and a truant officer, he said. Starting in 1975, he began touring Europe regularly.
In 1993, he released a comeback album in the States, Back Where I Belong, on Alligator, and earlier this year he released Billy Boy Sings Sonny Boy, a tribute to the man who taught him.
Just listen to the level of detail.
He first heard a Sonny Boy Williamson record when he was 11. "He had a unique way of singing," Arnold said. "He was the most original blues singer that appeared on records, and the only solo harmonica player on records at the time."
He found out that Sonny Boy lived in Chicago, and one day in 1948 he was working at his uncle's butcher shop at 31st and Giles. "I saw a guy pass with a guitar, so I ran out and I asked the guy did he know Sonny Boy," Arnold recalled. "He said, 'Yeah, Sonny Boy lives right there at 3226 Giles,' only two blocks from the shop." By the way, the address is correct, even from a distance of 60 years.
One day, after going to the movies, he went to visit Sonny Boy. "We rung the doorbell," Arnold said. "Never seen the man. Didn't know what he looked like. This well-dressed man came to the door, and he said, 'Can I help you?' And I said, 'We want to see Sonny Boy.' He said, 'This is Sonny Boy.' I said, 'We want to hear you play your harmonica.' He said, 'Come on up. I'm proud to have you all.'"
Arnold was direct in his inquiry: "Sonny boy, how do you make the harmonica say, 'Wowowow'?" he recalled. "He say you have to choke it."
And there began one of Billy Boy Arnold's two lessons with Sonny Boy Williamson. The bluesman would let him play and sing along with his records, and talk through his amp. But before a third lesson could happen, Williamson was murdered.
So what about those alternative histories of the name "Bo Diddley," that it was an inversion of the "diddley bow" instrument, for example?
"You heard the real story," Arnold said. "What I just said, that's exactly the way it went down. Now, he might have said anything, because he probably don't even remember exactly. But I remember all details, because it was that important to me, everything that went down."
