Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" sounds very much like one of my
favorites, "Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover". It's interesting to
compare.

Thinking on that it suddenly occured to me that his name might have
been a play on “diddley bow”, which is a sort of homemade one-stringed
zither. The player uses a bottle as a bridge for the string, and
changes the pitch by sliding the bottle up and down. When you hear
about blues artists whose first guitars were homemade, this is often
what was meant: it wasn't a six-string guitar, it was a diddley bow.

But it's not clear that Bo Diddley did play his name on the diddley
bow. "Diddly" also means something insignificant or of little value,
and might have been a disparaging nickname he received in his
youth. (It also appears in the phrase "diddly squat"). Maybe that's
also the source of the name of the diddley bow.