📍Bronzeville, Chicago, IL, USA
1935 – 1955“I was born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, in December 1928, and I was adopted and raised by my mother's cousin, Gussie McDaniel, so I became Ellas McDaniel. When I was a boy, she brought me and her three children to the South Side of Chicago, and we lived on Langley Avenue. The kids on the block teased me because I came from the country, so I learned to box to defend myself. The Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church took up a collection, bought me a violin and paid fifty cents a lesson for me to study with a classical teacher, O. W. Frederick, and I played in the church orchestra for years and even wrote pieces for the violin. But I was more excited by the joyful, rhythmic music I heard at a Pentecostal church nearby, and that sanctified rhythm got into my bones. For Christmas 1940 my sister Lucille bought me my first guitar, a cheap Harmony acoustic. At Foster Vocational School I learned to build things, and I made my own guitars, an upright bass and even a violin, and the kids there gave me the name Bo Diddley. In my early teens I was playing on the corners of the Maxwell Street market, with a trio called the Hipsters, later the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, after our street. In 1955 I recorded Bo Diddley and I'm a Man for Chess, with my own beat, the Bo Diddley beat, which shaped rock and roll. I played a rectangular guitar I designed myself, and I inspired Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones and generations of rockers. Chicago remembers the violin boy from Langley Avenue who invented a beat.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today