Bo Diddley performed “Bo Diddley” on The Ed Sullivan Show on November 20, 1955. The guitarist brought an established R&B hit to the broadcast, but Sullivan had asked him to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” The song viewers heard was Diddley’s own.
Sullivan had seen Diddley at Harlem’s Apollo Theater before booking him for a rhythm-and-blues showcase. At CBS Studio 50 in New York, the theater later named for Sullivan, WWRL disc jockey Tommy “Dr. Jive” Smalls handled Diddley’s introduction, calling him a “wonderful, folk, blues singer.” The booking came during the year of Diddley’s first record: Checker had released “Bo Diddley” backed with “I’m a Man,” and the single reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart. He was new to making hit records, with years of playing Chicago street corners behind him.
The record’s arrangement made rhythm the main attraction. “Bo Diddley” stayed on one chord, with the repeated guitar pattern, drums and maracas supplying its movement. The vocal rode that pattern in short, emphatic phrases. A song could keep moving without a series of chord changes because the players’ accents and the interaction between the instruments did so much of the work.
Music historian Ned Sublette, writing in Smithsonian in 2008, connected the pattern to Afro-Cuban clave while emphasizing the different feel Diddley brought to it. His swung phrasing and the prominent maracas gave the rhythm a character of its own. Sublette also described Diddley’s use of tremolo, distortion, echo and reverb to shape his guitar sound. The beat was one part of a broader approach to making an electric guitar carry a record.
The television booking put that identity up against a specific instruction. According to the program’s official retrospective, Sullivan heard Diddley singing “Sixteen Tons” backstage and asked him to perform it on the show. The song was a hit for Ford, while Diddley’s own record had reached the R&B audience without entering the pop chart. The disagreement concerned the material through which a national television audience would encounter him. After Diddley played his own song, Sullivan banned him from returning.
Diddley’s rhythmic approach continued to reach other musicians. Buddy Holly used the beat in “Not Fade Away” in 1957, and The Rolling Stones recorded that song in 1964. Those recordings carried his influence through a song he hadn’t written: other musicians could adopt the rhythmic pattern as well as cover his compositions.
Diddley never made a second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 2020, the program’s official YouTube channel published his performance of “Bo Diddley” as part of its online archive.
