Old Gods Almost Dead Read Free

harp, and drummer Elgin Evans—was the most popular group in Chicago.
    In 1950, Muddy reached back into the Delta for an old song called “Catfish Blues.” Played slow and solo on the bottom strings of his guitar, retitled “Rollin’ Stone,” the record eerily prophesied the future and a new blues generation, telling in a possessed, mysterious chant of “a boy child coming, gonna be a rollin’ stone, gonna be a rollin’ stone.”
    The rest is legend, as Muddy gathered the best musicians around him in the early 1950s. Junior Wells replaced Little Walter on harp. The Chess brothers’ bass player and arranger Willie Dixon wrote “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” for Muddy, another smash hit. Chester Burnett, known as Howlin’ Wolf, arrived in Chicago from West Point, Mississippi, in 1953 and lived with Muddy, who showed him around. A huge man famous in the Delta for performing on his hands and knees, baring his teeth and howling out pure murder, Wolf soon began a rivalry with Muddy that lasted as long as both lived.
    By 1955, Muddy was in his prime, full of regal authority, Cadillacs, and women. But in 1956, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Bill Haley took over pop music, speeding up R&B with a faster, rocking backbeat. Rock and roll damaged the market for blues records. Muddy Waters and his band still ruled in the taverns of Chicago and in the urban South, but now the Chess brothers had to find a new sound to stay in business.
    The diddley-bow is an ancient Delta poverty slide guitar, a one-stringed instrument made from a two-by-four, a couple of nails, some broom wire, and a crushed snuff can. You use a nail or a bottle cap for a slide and you get this piercing African tone that can carry for a hundred yards across a cotton field.
    Bo Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel in southwest Mississippi in 1928 and arrived in Chicago at the age of seven to live with his grandmother. When he was twelve, his sister gave him a guitar. “I’m completely self-taught and I don’t play like nobody else,” he says. “I was
all
rhythm, and I could drive you right out of your tree with
chords
and that fast wrist work.” He grew up as a ghetto fighter and street musician in the 1940s, playing with little groups called the Hipsters and the Jive Cats. Handy with tools, he was building his own electric guitars and amplifiers as Muddy’s band began taking over the professional blues scene. But “Mac” and his friends were half a generation younger; they began speeding up Muddy’s rhythms, and adapted the post-bop swing of hepcats like bandleader Louis Jordan and Nat Cole. A throbbing tremolo electric guitar gave the music an exotic, primitive edge. Since drums were hard to deploy on street corners, Mac used maracas for percussion, which gave his music an irresistible African sizzle and drive.
    In February 1955, he walked into the Chess studio on South Cottage Grove Avenue and tried to interest the man sitting at the counter in a demo recording of a song called “I’m a Man.” But Little Walter, who was helping around the office for pocket money, told Mac to go away. As he was leaving, Phil Chess came out and said he could play the tape. Within a month, they changed Mac’s name to Bo Diddley and released “I’m a Man” as a single, with “Bo Diddley” on the A side, and a new sound was born: an updated version of the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm, a grungy tremolo guitar, and the greasy buzzing of the maracas. This was early black rock and roll, and it was an instant hit on the radio. Soon every young band in America realized that the “Bo Diddley beat” could really jungle up a dance, and the rhythm just exploded. Other masterpieces followed: “Diddley Daddy,” “Pretty Thing,” “Who Do You Love,” “Hey Bo Diddley,” “Cops and Robbers,” and especially