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Who Do You Love? Bo Diddley’s Masterpiece
William Sundwick
On Chicago’s South Side, in the 1940s, a rich culture of
recently arrived African-Americans from the rural South made for an enduring
musical legacy. While not the sole birthplace of what we came to know as
“Rock-and-Roll,” the neighborhood contributed a disproportionately large share
of the artists who would ultimately spawn that new musical form. One of them
was Ellas McDaniel. He
was only six years old when his family moved from Mississippi to the South
Side, and his early musical talent was fostered by playing in his school
orchestra (violin and trombone).
Sometime in his teens, he heard a performance by great
bluesman John Lee Hooker. He was impressed and inspired. So, he formed a band
of his own with school friends. After playing on street corners, they soon found
gigs in neighborhood venues, before Ellas was even out of high school. He had
taught himself guitar, and was heavily influenced by the rhythmic cadence of music
heard in his Pentecostal church.
Chess was taking a risk releasing recordings from such
non-entities, but some of them achieved great success. Bo Diddley would, too, but
it was slow coming, by record industry standards. In 1956, when he first
recorded “Who Do You Love?”, Chess was already skeptical. This may have partly
been because McDaniel was banned from the Ed Sullivan show the previous year,
after misunderstanding his cue card, reading “Bo Diddley,” to mean he should
play his song by that name – rather than “Sixteen Tons,” as the script had
directed!
In the late fifties, McDaniel (by then well known in Rhythm
and Blues circles as Bo Diddley), moved to Washington, D.C. He was prosperous
enough to have his own basement recording studio on Rhode Island Avenue, N.E.
Here he recorded his album “Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger” and discovered some
local artists -- including Marvin Gaye, his valet, who sang in a Doo Wop group
called The Marquees.
Part of the early Chess Records promotional campaign for McDaniel
was to christen his unique syncopated R & B style the “Bo Diddley Beat.” This
can be loosely described as
a certain five accent clave. That first single, “Bo Diddley,” is a good
example. But, in fact, McDaniel did not invent it – it was a previously
recorded Afro-Cuban rhythm heard, among other places, in the Andrews Sisters’
“Rum and Coca Cola” (1944). Leonard Chess did encourage McDaniel to claim
credit, however, as part of the general promotion of his name.
Since the original version of “Who
Do You Love” did not even feature that “Bo Diddley Beat” (it was closer in
style to Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline”), there must be something else about the
song that caused it to become the best-known of all Bo Diddley works – based on the number of covers it’s
received by different musicians.
Could it be the bizarre lyrics
that make it such a masterpiece? They
were, according to the songwriter himself, based on children’s schoolyard
bragging in Kansas City, animated by a rhythmic body language. We don’t know
why McDaniel had been in K.C., or that schoolyard! But, the lyrics clearly have
some strong Voodoo overtones (or, “hoodoo,”
the Mississippi/Louisiana variant) – rather dark and threatening, describing a
harrowing journey through barbed wire, wearing a cobra snake for a necktie,
living in a house made of rattlesnake hide with a chimney “made out of a human
skull.” Fearless, he is “just 22 and I don’t mind dying” – harsh to his girlfriend,
Arlene, “don’t give me no lip”” – and the scene filled with cognitive
dissonance: “the night was dark, but the sky was blue” and “you should have
heard just what I seen.”
The original
song also is easily adaptable, not only to the classic “Bo Diddley Beat,”
but also to many different styles of rock music that developed through the
sixties and seventies. It was a particularly popular cover for some of the
California “psychedelic” bands. Perhaps this is attributable to the vaguely
Southwestern imagery of rattlesnakes and barbed wire in the lyrics.
The California connection
for Who Do You Love was contemporaneous with another by a New England coffee
house folk singer, Tom Rush. Rush recorded an early cover in 1966. His Who Do You Love had some
of his smoother folk attributes. But, when recorded by Elektra Records, Rush’s
version was transformed into a Rock-and-Roll staple, with that “Bo Diddley Beat.”
This was the first version of the song I ever heard, played on WHFS-FM radio.
Rush adopted a low-pitched growl for his vocal rendition, which captured both
the blues culture and the dark Voodoo lyrics perfectly. It ultimately led to my
wanting to learn more about the song, and about Bo Diddley.
At about the same time, Bo Diddley was becoming a cult on
the Left Coast. One of the prime examples of the San Francisco psychedelic
scene in the sixties was Quicksilver Messenger Service. Their second album,
“Happy Trails,” features the entire first side dedicated to an extended jam on Who
Do You Love, in six parts. Most of it is inspired more by Jerry Garcia and The
Grateful Dead than by Bo Diddley, but if you listen carefully, through the
haze, you can just barely make out the Bo Diddley Beat in parts, and the lyrics
are faithfully reproduced – in between the extended guitar riffs. The great
flexibility of the song to differing interpretations is on display in
Quicksilver’s performance
at Fillmore East in 1968.
My two favorite Who Do You Love covers are both by iconic
figures from California. The Doors picked it up for a series of live
performances in 1970. By this time in their career, Jim Morrison was drunk
at many concerts, and the backup band – especially John Densmore (drums) and
Robby Krieger (lead guitar) – often had to rescue him. Who Do You Love made
that role easy. Morrison’s slurred speech fit the surreal lyrics well, with
Densmore and Krieger were masterful in multiple recordings of the band doing
the song on tour. The Bo Diddley Beat is unmistakable. As is the inherent raw
power of the song.
By the late seventies, the blues revival was nearing its end
– Led Zeppelin was on the verge of breaking up – but one California artist was
having some success keeping it going. That was George Thorogood, with his band,
The Destroyers. His second album, “Move It On Over,” contained many great blues
numbers, often mashups of different Chicago blues classics, with altered lyrics,
and transition chords created by Thorogood. “Who Do You Love,” one of his most
enduring numbers was also here – Thorogood’s version adds a line to
the lyrics: “good time music with a Bo Diddley Beat,” and a couple other minor
changes – they fit perfectly, and the beat itself is adapted seamlessly.
Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love” is a masterpiece all by itself. He may have been
the best of the California R & B revival artists – maybe the last authentic
“Who Do You Love” cover?
So, where are they today? Yes, we’ve seen blues guitarists
more recently – notably Jack White – but, I’m not aware of any recent R & B
or rock covers of Bo Diddley. The Proto-Punk, Punk, and Metal trends in rock
seem to have passed him by. Who Do You Love would be eminently adaptable to any
of these later styles, I could have seen Motorhead doing a cover of it, for
example.
But, alas, though such attempts may have been made, they were never
released. Is it time for another revival? Surely, George Thorogood can’t be the
last in a line … maybe another musical style would work better? How about
jettisoning the “Bo Diddley Beat” altogether, like Elise
LeGrow is doing? Not rock-and-roll, but …
