I’m sitting here alone, late in the night of the day the great Bo Diddley died. I don’t expect it’s going that way for you. You’re not ending your day or working through the long, slow hours before the next one rises thinking about the life and times and lyrics of Ellas Otha Bates, Ellas McDaniel, Bo Diddley, the inventor of “The Bo Diddley Beat.” But I am.
I saw him just once, at Morganfield’s in Portland, ten or fifteen years ago, that venue since closed and reopened as a different sort of club catering to a different and younger clientele with whom I have much less in common than I feel I did with that old black man who sat on a chair because his back hurt too much to stand, but who sang “I’m A Man” and “Who Do You Love” and “You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover” and we all sang along with him, and not a few middle-aged Maine men went at last out into the night thinking for sure, “I look like a farmer, but I’m a lover,” their wives perhaps concurring, perhaps not.
June the second, 2008: the day Bo Diddley died. These events always make me spool up my mental track of Tom T. Hall’s “The Year Clayton Delaney Died,” another song you don’t much think of and may not know or have ever heard, but if you live long enough and have a soul and a heart and learn by repeated reduction the great and terrible lessons of lonely life, you’ll know how Mr. Hall could admit, “I went out in the woods and I cried” when some old drunken, “Lovesick Blues” picker passed away.
I think Bo is probably truly dead, not just hiding out in Vegas working on a second or third comeback special. In understanding this simple reality (and in some other ways, too, but not in all ways, certainly) I stand separate from the legions of middle-aged women who keep, even these thirty-one years later, wishing and hoping and a few probably actually believing that Elvis Lives. I have three plants of a Hosta cultivar called `Elvis Lives’, which is interesting but not a significant piece of information relative to tonight’s discussion. But I was not hired to teach anybody significant facts, was I? I can make more hostas by cutting apart my growing plants with a knife, but you can’t raise the dead back up when they’re in defeat.

wiscassetnewspaper.maine.com


Tags: , ,