Bo Diddley Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation and a Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He is also recognized for his technical innovations, including his distinctive rectangular guitar, with its unique booming, resonant, shimmering tones. Born in McComb, Mississippi, as Ellas Otha Bates, he was adopted and raised by his mother's cousin, Gussie McDaniel, whose surname he assumed. In 1934, the McDaniel family moved to the South Side of Chicago, where he dropped the Otha and became Ellas McDaniel. He was an active member of Chicago's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he studied the
British rhythm and blues lived proto-supergroup Steampacket in 1965. Baldry moved on to front Bluesology, which had originally been formed as an R&B band in 1962 by teenage keyboardist Reggie Dwight, later better known as Elton John. Baldry enjoyed his greatest success with pop ballads, beginning with "Let the Heartaches Begin" (1967), which reached number one in Britain, but, despite supporting the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he remained virtually unknown outside of the UK. After Steampacket dissolved in 1966, Rod Stewart joined blues-rock combo Shotgun Express and then The Jeff Beck Group, and when that broke up in 1969 he moved on to