“I don’t sound like nobody!” was Bo Diddley’s maxim in the 1950s, but over the decades dozens have tried to sound like him. Often imitated but not always acknowledged, the influence of the Bo Diddley beat — driving and relentless like the chant of a chain gang — is heard clearest and most famously on the Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away. But that sound, which Bo Diddley called his “tradesman’s knock”, is just as discernible on U2’s Desire, or versions of the garage classic I Want Candy recorded by the Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow two decades apart, or on George Michael’s Faith.

Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry aside, arguably none of the first generation of American rock’n’rollers had a greater impact on the subsequent course of popular music. Along with Berry, Diddley was also one of the first black performers to “cross over” and enjoy success in the predominantly white pop chart of the time. Among the classic singles to his name, all driven by the primitive but irresistible beat he likened to a freight train, were Diddy Wah Diddy, Who Do You Love?, Mona, You Can’t Judge a Book by Looking at its Cover, Road Runner and Say Man. The latter gave him his biggest American hit, but he also had a huge influence on the British beat boom of the 1960s. In addition to the Rolling Stones, those who covered his songs included the Kinks, the Animals, Manfred Mann and the Yardbirds, while the Pretty Things named themselves after one of his songs.

Bo Diddley was born Otha Elias Bates in McComb, Mississippi, but his mother was too poor to raise him. When he was 5 she handed him over to her cousin, Gussie McDaniel, a Sunday school teacher in Chicago, and he took the name Elias McDaniel. His musical aptitude was evident from an early age when he was sent to learn the violin at the local Ebeneezer Baptist Church. But after a broken finger made it difficult to continue with the instrument, he took up a battered old acoustic guitar.

By his teens, however, he was looking to his fists rather than his fingers: to make a living as a promising young boxer. It was, he later claimed, while competing in Golden Gloves boxing competitions that he acquired the name by which he was to be known for the rest of his life, derived from the Southern putdown “you ain’t bo diddley”, meaning “you’re nothing”, but also carrying the sense of “bad bo diddley”, implying someone it would be foolish to cross.

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When his boxing led nowhere he took to playing guitar on the streets of Chicago with his friend Jerome Green. He later recalled how while playing on a Chicago street corner, someone told him he was a “funky dude”. Unaware that the word had gained new meaning, he squared up for a fight.

Inspired by the jumping, jiving dance music of Louis Jordan and the blues of Muddy Waters, Diddley spent five years playing on the streets while working on construction sites for extra money. Constantly berated at home for playing “the Devil’s music”, he finally retorted “Well, the Devil ain’t never paid me!” and left home. Around the same time, he saw John Lee Hooker playing an electric guitar for the first time and in 1954 he switched to the amplified instrument, forming a band that included Green on maracas and Billy Boy Arnold on harmonica.

After being turned down at audition by Vee Jay Records, he was offered a deal at Chess Records, Chicago’s premier blues label. Recording with cheap microphones, he found that his enthusiastic twanging and rhythmic excitement was easily distorted. Instead of trying to clean up the recordings, he astutely chose to make the distortion a trademark of his sound.

His first single I’m a Man became a hit on the R&B chart in 1955. It was not exactly blues or even R&B — although it owed an allegiance to both — but represented a new kind of guitar-based rock’n’roll which was earthy, basic, unrefined, jive-talking — and decidedly funky. A second single, Diddley Daddy, followed it up the charts and in November that year he became the first black artist to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. He had been asked to perform Sixteen Tons, a song by the country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford. Once the cameras were rolling, he instead strummed the raucous riff from his signature tune, Bo Diddley. The show went out live and a furious Sullivan could do nothing. Diddley was banned from appearing on the show again but he didn’t care. The row had already made his reputation as a rock’n’roll pioneer.

Over the next few years, further hits were rattled off in quick succession, many of them crossing over from the black R&B chart to the pop charts. By 1960 the rock’n’roll revolution was complete: Road Runner made the Billboard pop chart but failed to rank on the R&B chart.

Diddley also developed a fearsome reputation as a dynamic live performer playing a low-slung rectangular guitar, made for him after an early gig in which, according to legend, he injured his most sensitive parts by jumping off a chair and landing on his Gibson electric. Thereafter he switched to the light, compact box-shaped Gretsch “twang machine” that, along with a black hat, became his trademarks.

His greatest records were recorded almost entirely for Chess and its subsidiary, Checker, but like so many young black artists in the 1950s, he was never paid all the royalties he was due. It was not until the late 1960s that he came to realise that he was owed far more than he had received. He later regretted with some bitterness how easily fobbed off he had been by the advance of a few hundred dollars or the gift of a Cadillac — largesse which at the time had seemed astonishing to him after his frugal upbringing.

By the mid-1960s he appeared to be resting on his laurels and little he wrote or recorded from this period came near to matching the inspiration of his early run. In truth it mattered not a jot for he was already established as a rock legend. In particular, he was lionised by the British beat groups of that time, led by the Rolling Stones who openly acknowledged him as a hero and whose early repertoire included a number of his songs.

American rock groups were slower to pay homage but by the late 1960s groups such as the Doors and Quicksilver Messenger Service were also mining his songbook and giving his hits a psychedelic makeover. Paradoxically, as updated interpretations of his compositions such as Who Do You Love and Mona became staples of the rock repertoire, the sparse simplicity of his own versions came to sound old-fashioned and he found himself in poor financial circumstances.

By 1969 he was working as a mechanic when the impresario Richard Nader found him and booked him for a rock’n’roll revival tour. He was still signed to Chess Records for whom he recorded sporadically and unsatisfyingly until 1976, but the growing nostalgia market kept him in gainful work on the live stage and in 1979 the Clash asked him to support them on their American tour. Contrary to expectation, the concerts were a great success, helping to rebrand Diddley as “the godfather of garage rock”.

Although his spare and resonant songs continued to be widely covered and he continued to record, there was little further of note until 1995, when he released the rather good A Man Amongst Men — the “men” who supported him and stirred him to his best performances in decades included Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, of the Rolling Stones, and the album also reunited him with Billy Boy Arnold from his first band more than 40 years earlier.

In later years, he finally managed to reclaim some of his unpaid dues. He lived for many years in New Mexico, serving for two and a half years as deputy sheriff in the Valencia County Citizens’ Patrol, to which he donated two patrol cars. He often appeared at homeless and anti-drug benefits, and last year played a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In the mid-1990s he cut the single Kids Don’t Do It with his grandson.

In later years he suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure and in May 2007 he suffered a stroke.

Bo Diddley, rock’n’roll singer, songwriter and guitarist, was born on December 30, 1928. He died on June 2, 2008, aged 79