Bo Knows : Last Few Years Have Been Pretty Good for Diddley

Bo knows irony.

“You work your buns off all these years--going up and down the highway, riding those raggedy airplanes and stuff like that,” Bo Diddley says. “And I make a commercial with Bo Jackson and all I say is “Bo, you don’t know Diddley!’ and all of a sudden I’m back up at the top again?

“I ain’t figured this out yet.”

Indeed. The fact is that after several rough decades--the loss of most of his royalties to unscrupulous record label owners followed by years of undeserved semi-obscurity--the past few years have been very good to Bo Diddley.

In 1987, he was inducted into the still-unbuilt Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, belated recognition for the rhythmic cornerstones Diddley laid as one of rock’s key architects in the ‘50s.

Then, MCA put out “Bo Diddley: The Chess Box,” gathering crucial recordings Diddley made for the Chicago label between 1955 and 1968, which provided not only artistic validation but also the first royalties Diddley ever received for those classic tracks.

And then Diddley made a Nike commercial with another Bo, last name Jackson.

That commercial--in which sports virtuoso Jackson unsuccessfully tackles the electric guitar--provided a much-needed boost for Diddley. The Nike ads--Diddley won’t say what they earned him--made him visible again, made him real to a new generation of fans who knew him only secondhand when their favorite bands did songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love?,” “Mona,” “I’m a Man,” “Pretty Thing,” “Road Runner” and “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover.”

Diddley in his 60s looks pretty much as he has since the ‘60s--squat, genial and thoughtful behind the familiar thick black frames of his glasses.

“Phil and Leonard Chess robbed me,” Diddley says evenly, of the owners of the label that recorded him, Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon and other seminal rock figures. “I know they robbed me but I didn’t have sense enough to know it at the time they were doing it.”

Royalty subterfuge and creative bookkeeping that seldom favored the artist were all too common practices at small labels in the ‘50s, though Diddley was also “robbed,” as he calls it, by subsequent owners of the Chess catalogue--until MCA bought it in 1987. “They’ve been kicking out a few bucks to Bo Diddley. They take care of business, and I’m very happy about it.

“But all the things that I own, I got by working one-nighters, not from no royalty checks.”

Serious money was usually just out of reach for Diddley, who was born Otha Ellis Bates in McComb, Miss., in 1928 and changed his name to Ellas McDaniel when he was adopted by his mother’s cousin after moving to Chicago in 1933.

He picked up the Diddley name--a slang term for street savvy--for his boxing prowess; prophetically, it was also the name of an African one-string guitar. Diddley began playing a six-string American cousin after starting on violin and dropping it when he noticed a dearth of black violinists. He built his first guitar in shop class at Foster Vocational School. “I just decided to make a square one and see if it worked, and it did, so I used it in my act.”

He approached his career with much the same focus he did his guitar playing.

“I kept pounding at it,” Diddley said. “It was like being in jail and you’ve got a chisel and a hammer and the chisel is dull, but you keep beating at that same spot and eventually you’re going to get a hole through there. It might take a little while, but you keep pounding. And you might not get out but you can see through it, dig?”