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 metal. Some, like Mayall, continued to play a "pure" form of the blues, but largely outside of mainstream notice. The structure of clubs, venues and festivals that had grown up in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Britain virtually disappeared in the 1970s. By 1970 British rhythm and blues had virtually ceased to exist as an active genre. Rhythm and blues bands began to find it very difficult to achieve serious album sales, even in the UK. Vinegar Joe, formed in 1971 around the vocals of Elkie Brooks and Robert Palmer and the instrumental talents of Pete Gage and