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Bo Diddley walked over to me while I was seated at my drum set and told me to play the strangest beat I’d ever heard.

“Play the snare on the one and three and the bass drum on the two and four,” he said.  “Don’t play anything else.” 

“This is what you want me to play?” I asked in disbelief. “Yes. Play it,” Bo said. “Show it to me.”

Who was I to argue with him? I was backing him up in fall 1988 with two Humboldt County, California musical colleagues of mine, bassist Gary Davidson and guitarist Thad Beckman, at the Eagle House in Eureka.

The legendary rock and roll guitarist/singer/songwriter, dressed in a long blue shirt and his trademark black cowboy hat, tutored me in front of a sold-out crowd.

I hit my snare on the one beat, bass drum on the two, snare on the three and bass drum on the four. It sounded like a punch press I’d operated in a Racine factory I worked in a summer job  between semesters at the University Wisconsin-Madison.

“One, two, three, four” over and over. It was the exact opposite of the beats that were the foundation of the blues, country, rock and roll and soul beats I’d been playing for the past 20 years. The bass drum was always on the one and three, the snare – the backbeat – on the two and four.

Bo, whose real name was Ellas McDaniel, joined me playing a calypso rhythm while Davidson and Beckman slipped in. At one point I added some calypso offbeats on my hi-hat cymbals.  Bo looked at me sternly. “Don’t play that.”

I did what I was told. I went back to my unadorned, factory-punch-press beat. No cymbals. The song felt like it lasted a long time. It was painful. 

After I played the bizarre beat, he told me he wanted to play my drums. I said OK, got up from my drum chair and handed him my sticks. 

Bo Diddley wham-banging the author’s drums.

He proceeded to bash my drums hard, playing a chaotic din of cymbal crashes and tom tom drum rolls. “Wham-banging around,” as my late mother-in-law Marybelle Meade used to say about loud drummers.  After a few minutes he stopped. The audience loved it. He handed me my sticks without a word.  We continued the show. 

Bo was considered a rhythmic innovator for creating the Bo Diddley beat which he used on his first hit, “Bo Diddley,” released on Chess in 1955. It’s based on a West African clave (cla-vay) beat — think “shave and hair cut .. two bits.“ It’s the rhythmic heart of all Latin music.

The drummer, Clifton James, played the beat on his lower-pitched tom toms along with Jerome Green’s insistent maracas, Bo’s driving rhythmic guitar and James Bradford’s strong bass. That beat spread like a surging pulse through rock and roll in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Two years after “Bo Diddley” was released, Buddy Holly recorded “Not Fade Away” featuring a strong Bo Diddley beat. It became a hit for Holly and a feature in the Grateful Dead’s live repertoire for decades.

The Rolling Stones recorded Bo’s “Mona” on their first album in 1964. It was also driven by the classic Bo Diddley beat.

Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, he recorded numerous hits including “Pretty Thing,” “You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at its Cover,” and “I’m a Roadrunner” for Checker Records. He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I owned Bo’s greatest hits on vinyl. I knew that not all his songs contained the Bo Diddley beat.  He recorded blues shuffles and fast two-beats among other rhythms. 

Davidson and Beckman played with Bo a year before, also at the Eagle House. Local drummer Mike Myers was in the trio. When Davidson called me about playing the show with him and Beckman, he told me last year Bo asked Myers before the show, “Do you know the Bo Diddley beat?”

When Myers said, “Yes, of course,” Bo said, “Don’t play it and we’ll get along just fine.” No explanation.

I hoped to ask Bo before the show how he’d like me to play. I never got the chance. He stayed in his Eagle House Hotel room while we set up. The band played three warm-up songs.

Bo walked onto the stage, never acknowledging the band. He plugged in his guitar and strummed a chord. “The amp’s sick. I can’t play it,” he said. 

Luckily, the Two Street Music store was directly across the street. An employee at the show and immediately went over there and got a new Fender guitar amplifier while the sold-out audience waited.

The new amp was to Bo’s liking, and we started playing his songs. The crowd dug it. I never played his signature Bo Diddley beat.

Bo Diddley, Jeff DeMark, Paul DeMark.

After the show backstage, Bo entertained two young women while playing a piano. My brother Jeff was backstage with me. He never said a word to us. Never looked at us.

Years later I read that he had been cheated out of millions of dollars in royalties. A year after playing with him he won a lawsuit and recouped several million in lost revenue. I better understood his bitter, hard edges

Our white, Humboldt pick-up trio was probably common for him as he traveled the country playing one-night shows for not enough money. He may have looked at us as just more untrustworthy white people, like the ones who probably ripped him off of his royalties. 

In recent years I’ve been hearing Americana drummers occasionally putting the backbeat on the one and three, similar to the bewildering beat he had me play. 

Maybe the mysterious Bo Diddley was onto something after all. But it was still, no doubt, seriously weird for me to play.

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Thank you to my invaluable editor, Pam Long, and my skilled photo scanner, Julian DeMark.

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Paul DeMark is a writer and musician. You can read previous installments of his Musical Memoirs at this link, or on his Substack.