"Bo Diddley" (Bo Diddley)

It takes a special brand of audacity to name a song after yourself.  Then again, Ellas McDaniel (a.k.a. Bo Diddley) had every reason to be audacious.  He was a multi-instrumentalist, who knew how to play everything from classical violin to trombone, in addition to guitar.  He invented and built the rectangular-shaped instrument that became his calling card.  And, most importantly, he found a way to bridge the electric blues from the South Side of Chicago where he was raised with the intricate polyrhythms and harmonies he'd grown up hearing in church, laying the foundations of rock & roll.
He was indeed "The Originator" (a title he gave himself).
The song "Bo Diddley" was one of those rare tunes that my dad would crank up whenever he'd hear it on oldies radio.  Its easy rhyme scheme, a take-off on the traditional lullaby "Hush, Little Baby," appealed to me as a kid because I could sing along.  So I always associate it with Sunday drives out in the country or camping trips with him in the South Carolina foothills.
For as simple as the song sounds, it actually was pretty groundbreaking.  The "shave-and-a-haircut"/3-2 clave rhythm that drives the track was pretty unusual for pop music in its day.  It's derived from the rhythm of the West African juba dance, where one uses the body to create percussion.  The dance basically got transformed into the hambone here in the U.S., which also incorporates slapping your knees/thighs/chest/etc. to create a beat while singing or speaking rhyming couplets.  Long story short, the so-called "Bo Diddley Beat" became one of the pillars of rock and roll, with everyone from Buddy Holly to The Clash referencing it in some way over the years.
The guitar effects on the song are also pretty notable because no one else at the time (1955) was attempting anything quite like it.  Diddley's whacked out tremolo, which warbles in perfect syncopation with the drums, points the way to the kind of guitar effects and distortion that Jimi Hendrix would make part of his sound more than a decade later.