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I was tied up with errands today, but my husband emailed me the news that Bo Diddley had died at his Florida home. Kevin knew that Bo was always one of my special rock artists and, even though he’d been been ill and he was 79, the death of Bo Diddley was still a shock.

I have Bo’s music on record albums, cassettes, CDs, mp3s–in short, as new media came along, I always made sure the Diddley beat was playing somewhere in my house or car. The classic Bo Diddley beat that everyone copied and that Bo could have copyrighted is rock ‘n roll at its most pure and powerful. The obituaries in the news today have mentioned how many came after Bo and copied his rhythm. No one said they copied Bo himself, who was a true original, and Bo never copied anyone else, either. He was one of a kind.

Who else had a monster rock band that featured a guy on maracas? Or a no-nonsense guitar player named the Dutchess during a time when women in rock looked more like debutantes? Who else wore thick Poindexter glasses on a rock stage? (Buddy Holly came after and also copied Bo’s rhythm in “Not Fade Away.”) Or who wrote so many odes to a mythical hero named “Bo Diddley” who could do anything? Bo was actually Ellas McDaniel, a former violin player who designed his own guitars. Those rectangular guitars, the ones covered in fur and the ones that looked unlike anything other than an electrified folk guitar were also Bo’s innovations.

Despite the thick glasses, I don’t think anyone would have called Bo a dweeb, only because he could be scary looking and because no one rocked harder than he did. He could also do lovely, lyrical songs such as “Dearest Darling” and hilarious tunes such as “Hey, Man,” where he and his maracas player, Jerome Green, trade insults that include “You’re so ugly the stork that brought in the world ought to be arrested.” Bo Diddley could also be supremely funny.

I love “The Story of Bo Diddley,” where between cackles and laughs, he records the tale of the character he became. Even though Ellas McDaniel never knew his father, the father of the character “Bo Diddley” in the song says, “Mama, this boy is gonna be a myth!” Bo Diddley ended up as just that.

Years ago, I was home sick one afternoon when Kevin told me that our local news station was going to feature Bo Diddley as the call-in guest. I had a terrible cold and no voice, but I did something I haven’t done since: I dialed the radio station waiting to speak to one of my favorite artists. When it was my turn, all I could tell Bo was, “You are the true king of rock ‘n roll. Thanks for all the great music.”

Bo was appreciative and thanked me before the station went to the next caller. I think that everyone who dialed in that afternoon felt the way I did about Bo Diddley’s huge musical contribution and his style. In music, there are originals and there are imitators. Bo Diddley was unique even among the greats in music.

Bo’s originality never really paid off in terms of material riches. The groups that imitated his style made millions more than he ever did. One of Bo’s famous quotes was, “A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun.” The contracts he signed in the 1950s deprived him of any royalties from songs that still play constantly on mp3s, jukeboxes, CDs and live performances around the clock all over the world. Bo was forced to tour as much as he could to make a life for himself and his family. He lived on a farm near Gainesville, FL, instead of a mansion like Graceland.

Even as Bo Diddley aged, his bad self never got older. My favorite cut in the soundtrack to “La Bamba,” a 1987 musical bio about singer Richie Valens, is the song that accompanies a motorcycle ride by Bob, Valens’ reprobate older brother. As Esai Morales, the actor playing Bob, rides, a totally wicked version of ”Who Do You Love?” that sounds like hell breaking loose, sets the mood. That version was newly recorded by Bo Diddley when he was old enough to collect Social Security. There wasn’t a better true rock song that year than Bo Diddley’s version of the song he had written and recorded more than 30 years before.

Bo Diddley’s beat came from West Africa by way of the slaves who managed to bring remnants of their music to America. A Brazilian anthropologist whom I once interviewed about the journey of African rhythms to the New World told me that, in Cuba and Brazil, African music stayed at its most pure. Everywhere else, he said, the drums had been taken away by the slavemasters and the music had become a hybrid. That melange found a great interpreter in Bo Diddley, as towering a figure in American music as Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker.

Bo Diddley boasted in “Road Runner” that no one could keep up with him, and he was right. A true original left us today and American culture is less vibrant as a result.