Bo Diddley

Influential singer and guitarist Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in 1928 in McComb, Mississippi.

At age five he was adopted by his mother’s cousin and took her surname of McDaniel, relocating to Chicago.

He played several instruments in church and eventually embraced the guitar, bringing some of the trance-inducing qualities of religious services to his own music in the early 1950s.