I remember meeting Bo Diddley.
It was about 15 years ago in the lift lobby of a hotel in Sao Paulo. He was about to get into the car I had just exited, along with Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown.
Gatemouth was due to play Hong Kong, and there was a possibility that I might preview the show. I had a camera and asked somewhat nervously if I might take a picture. The pair were very gracious and assented, but I couldn't get the shutter to click.
'It might help,' Diddley said, 'if you took off the lens cap.' I've lost that picture, and when Gatemouth died in 2005 I wished I still had it.
I wished that again last week when I heard Diddley had died on Monday at the age of 79. I also remember seeing him in concert in the late 1970s, on a rock'n'roll nostalgia bill with Carl Perkins at a relatively low point in both their careers. Diddley stole the show. He had a backing group, but they were almost superfluous. All he needed for the Bo Diddley beat was an amp and that rectangular guitar.
Obituaries have tended to portray him as an egotist, but he was probably just compensating for having been swindled out of a lot of money and kudos that was his due. As a musician and songwriter he was hugely influential. When rock journalist and blues scholar Charles Shaar Murray credited him with 'inventing both psychedelic guitar and rap' he wasn't exaggerating by all that much.
Diddley was a sad loss for both rock'n'roll and the blues, and Jimmy McGriff who died just over a week earlier at the age of 72 was an equally sad loss to the blues and to jazz.