Two years ago Bo Diddley, 78, stood on stage and told his fans: “I ain’t dead yet, and I think I’ve been spared to tell the truth.” What he referred to was the world’s popular assumption that it was Elvis Presley who started rock’n’roll, something that clearly irks him. He has declared in interviews that he and Chuck Berry were the real pioneers and that Presley was three years behind. “Elvis Presley didn’t start no goddam rock’n’ roll,” he once said. “He got on the bandwagon while it was rolling.”

It is perhaps ironic then that Diddley hits the headlines when fans are mourning the 30th anniversary of the death of “the King”. It was not an intentional upstaging. Diddley had a heart attack and is in a Florida hospital, having had a stent implanted. But is a timely reminder of how close we have come to losing one of the true innovators, a man who took the rhythmic “shave-and-haircut” beats of the street entertainers of his youth and created a Bo Diddley beat that would conquer the rock world. One of the Rolling Stones’ first records was a cover of Diddley’s Mona. Eric Clapton’s mainstay Before You Accuse Mewas a song that Diddley had thrown away on a B-side.

Diddley was born Ellas Otha Bates in 1928 on a Mississippi farm. His nickname came from students at his high school in Chicago, where the family moved in the 1930s. For Christmas in 1940, his sister Lucille bought him his first guitar, a cheap Harmony acoustic, and he began playing the street-corner circuit. But it was not until 1955 that he released his first single – a double Aside Bo Diddley/I’m a Man. It went straight to the top of the rhythm and blues charts, establishing him and his “hambone” percussion sound as one of the most exciting new talents in American music.

Another trademark are his square, makeshift guitars. Fans at a recent London gig noticed one was held together by gaffer tape. His style is one of the most copied yet, like many artists of his era, four-times married Diddley says that he wasn’t adequately compensated for many of the covers of his songs. “Where’s the money? Where did it go? It didn’t come to me,” he once said. “We were in a very messed-up situation between black and white.” He imagined the executives pondering his payment thus: “Give him $20 and he’s happy. Buy him a Cadillac . . . that’s all they need in the ghetto.”

Diddley, who had a stroke last May, denies that he is bitter about Elvis’s millions, but has said: “We were going through a racial time and the white brothers wanted to play the music while they sat me in a corner.” So perhaps the last word should go to Rolling Stone, which said in 2005: “History belongs to the victors and in the annals of rock’n’roll, three men have emerged as winners: Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley, a holy trinity that was there at the start.”

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