Muddy Waters

Bo Diddley Revisited

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Bo Diddley Revisited

I’ve been making good use of my time, watching YouTube videos of interviews with Eric Burdon, former front man for the Animals.[1] In the mid-Sixties, the Animals ranked as my favorite band because the timbre of Burdon’s singing voice sounded as if he could have been from my native ground, the Lowcountry of South Carolina (as opposed to Eric’s Newcastle-upon-Tyne). In fact, it was the Animals, and to lesser extent the Rolling Stones, who introduced me the blues, to Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and a host of others.

Decades ago, at his record store on Society Street (we’re talking Charleston, South Carolina), Gary Erwin, AKA Shrimp City Slim, told me that the Animals also had turned him onto R&B and the blues. He referenced their album Animal Tracks as his gateway into the land of shotgun shacks, cotton fields, black snakes, two-timing, big-legged women, and prison farms. 

Here’s the tracklist for Animal Tracks.

A1We Gotta Get Out Of This Place3:17
A2Take It Easy Baby2:51
A3Bring It On Home To Me2:40
A4The Story Of Bo Diddley5:42
B1Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood2:26
B2I Can’t Believe It3:35
B3Club A-Go-Go2:19
B4Roberta2:04
B5Bury My Body2:52
B6For Miss Caulker3:55

Although “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and “Don’t’ Let Me Be Misunderstood” are the big hits from the album, my two favorite tracks are the magnificent cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” and “The Story of Bo Diddley,” a sort of pop song bio of one of the pioneers of rock-n-roll, which ends with a comic encounter when Bo, his sister the Duchess, and Jerome Greene meet the Animals at the Club A-Go-Go in Newcastle. 

Listen and read along:

Now lets hear the story of Bo Diddley
And the Rock n Roll scene in general

Bo Diddley was born Ellis McDaniels
In a place called McCoom, Missississipi about 1926
He moved to Chicago about 1938
Where his name was eventually changed to Bo Diddley.


He practiced the guitar everyday and sometimes into the night
Till his papa’s hair began to turn white
His Pa said “Son, listen hear, I know
You can stay but that guitar has just gotta go.”


So he pulled his hat down over his eyes
Headed out for them Western Skies
I think Bob Dylan said that, he hit New York City.


He began to play at the Apollo in Harlem,
Good scene there, everybody raving.
One day, one night, came a Cadillac with four head lights
Came a man with a big, long, fat, cigar said,
“C’mere son, I’m gonna make you a star”
Bo Diddley said, “Uh.whats in it for me?”
Man said, “Shut your mouth son,
Play the guitar and you just wait and see.”


Well, that boy made it, he made it real big
And so did the rest of the rock n roll scene along with him
And a white guy named Johnny Otis took Bo Diddleys rhythm
He changed it into hand-jive and it went like this
In a little old country town one day
A little old country band began to play
Add two guirtars and a beat up saxophone
When the drummer said, boy, those cats begin to roam

Oh baby oh we oh oh
Ooh la la that rock and roll
Ya hear me oh we oh oh
Ooh la la that rock and roll

Then in the U.S. music scene there was big changes made.
Due to circumstances beyond our control such as payola,
The rock n roll scene died after two years of solid rock
And you got discs like, ah…
Take good care of my baby
Please don’t ever make her blue and so forth.


About, ah, one year later in a place called Liverpool in England
Four young guys with mop haircuts began to sing stuff like, ah…
It’s been a hard days night and I’ve been working like a dog and so on.

In a place called Richmond in Surrey, whay down in the deep south

They got guys with long hair down their back singing
I wanna be your lover baby I wanna be your man yeah and all that jazz.


Now we’ve doing this number, Bo Diddley, for quite some time now
Bo Diddley visited this country last year
We were playing at the Club A Gogo in Newcastle, our home town.

The doors opened one night and to our surprise
Walked in the man himself, Bo Diddley
Along with him was Jerome Green, his maraca man,
And the Duchess, his gorgeous sister.
And a we were doing this number


Along with them came the Rolling Stones, the Mersey Beats,
They’re all standing around diggin’ it
And I overheard Bo Diddley talkin’
He turned around to Jermone Green
And he said, “Hey, Jerome? What do you think these guys
Doin’ our.our material?”


Jerome said, “Uh, where’s the bar, man? Please show me to the bar…”


He turned around the Duchess
And he said, “Hey Duchess… what do you think of these young guys
Doin’ our material?”


She said, “I don’t know. I only came across here
To see the changin’ of the guards and all that jazz.”


Well, Bo Diddley looked up and said to me,
With half closed eyes and a smile,
He said “Man, ” took off his glasses,
He said, “Man, that sure is the biggest load of rubbish
I ever heard in my life…”


Hey Bo Diddley
Oh Bo Diddley
Yeah Bo Diddley
Oh Bo Diddley
Yeah Bo Diddley

from lest to right, Bo Diddley, the Duchess, and jerome Green
Bo, the Duchess, and Jerome Green

By the way, this is my second homage to Bo. I also wrote about him in April of 2021 and my father-in-law’s Bo Diddley obsession. If so inclined, you can access that HERE, and it features videos of Bo performing on the Ed Sullivan Show and a snippet from the movie Fritz the Cat. 

By the way, the white fellow in the collage up above is my father-in-law Lee Tigner in his younger days.

[bongo fade out]

[1] What prompted this foray into nostalgia was my recent poem, which you can access HERE, “The St James Infirmary iPhone Blues.”

A Roundabout Trip to Cuckold Landing

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Joan Weston

Joan Weston

An unlovely sentence from Wikipedia: “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease causes the brain tissue to degenerate rapidly, and as the disease destroys the brain, the brain develops holes, and the texture changes to resemble that of a kitchen sponge.”

CJD, by the way, killed Joan Weston, aka the Blonde Bomber, aka the Big Blonde Amazon, who skated her way into the Roller Derby Hall of Fame with the San Francisco Bay Area Bombers. I watched both roller derby and wrestling when I was a boy and considered Joanie, as the announcers sometimes called her, a beauty.

Again, from Wikipedia, “Weston was a mentor to many professional Roller Derby skaters that made it on a team. She was said to take rookies under her wing.”

(Not surprisingly, Weston didn’t take not-destined-to-be rookies who didn’t “make it on a team” under her wing).

The word “rookie,” by the way, was coined in the late 19th century, “perhaps as an alternation of recruit, influenced by rook, a gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face, nesting in colonies in treetops.”

Here’s a great stanza from a song from Love’s Labors Lost in which the word rook appears:

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,

And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,

When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,

And maidens bleach their summer smocks,

The cuckoo then, on every tree,

Mocks married men; for thus sings he,

“Cuckoo;

Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear!

“Cuckoo” displeases a “married ear” because it sounds like “cuckold,” a married man whose wife has, as many a bluesman has put it, “another mule kicking in his stall.”  Let Muddy Waters tell you about it.

“When I picked up the receiver,/The party said, “Another mule kicking’ in your stall.”

The following nugget comes from the Wordorigens Discussion Forum:

The allusion to the cuckoo on which the word cuckold is based may not be appreciated by those unfamiliar with the nesting habits of certain varieties of this bird. The female of some Old World cuckoos lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving them to be cared for by the resident nesters. This parasitic tendency has given the female bird a figurative reputation for unfaithfulness as well. Hence in Old French we find the word cucuault, composed of cocu, cuckoo, cuckold, and the pejorative suffix ald and used to designate a husband whose wife has wandered afield like the female cuckoo. An earlier assumed form of the Old French word was borrowed into Middle English by way of Anglo-Norman. Middle English cokewold, the ancestor of Modern English cuckold, is first recorded in a work written around 1250.”

11224584_10206667078984560_762045676183454566_nEO Wilson explains that the average human ejaculation contains ~180 million sperm while women possess a scant 400 or so ova.  Why then, genetically speaking, would a man stick with one woman when he could be inseminating dozens?  Because prehistorically the chances of offspring surviving (and the man’s genes replicating) were significantly higher if the man helped protect his offspring. This state of affairs, Wilson argues, explains the male tendency to jealousy and to violence when he discovers “his woman” has been untrue.  Given all that genetic firepower, who wants to raise an unfaithful mate’s child from an interloper?

Got a wife in Chino, babe, and one in Cherokee/
The first one says she’s got my child, but it don’t look like me.

There’s a boat landing near Green Pond, SC, called Cuckold Landing. The sign used to read “Cuckholds (sic) Landing,” but it’s been corrected.

By the way, clicking on google images for “Cuckholds Landing” yields several pornographic images and this intriguing teaser:

‪The Magnificent Cuckold | Paul Bargetto‪

‪Paul Bargetto directed The Magnificent Cuckold in October 2007 at the Connelly Theater in New York City. The Magnificent Cuckold is a penetrating study of …

I swear the ellipses are real!

mc_front_final

You Do Hoodoo Sound Track

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mash it upIn this age of the rank amateur, I thought I’d mash up a theme song for the blog.  Collage, baby, collage.  It’s sorta like Muddy Waters meets the B-52’s meets Screaming’ Jay Hawkins meets the Boss.  The end is guaranteed to transform even woebegone Mike Pence’s thin-lipped frown into a smile.

Click the arrow for sound.