AMG Review of Gold

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

Released four months after Bo's death -- and roughly a year and a half after Universal's single-disc The Definitive Collection -- the double-disc Gold is a thorough 41-track overview of Diddley's classic Chess recordings, containing all the usual suspects and filling out the margins with some of Bo's bluesier material. This emphasis on blues gives Gold a different spin than Chess UK's 2006 set The Story of Bo Diddley, which was a full 13 tracks longer than this 2008 comp and gave a lot of space to Bo's weirder work, like when he called out Khrushchev, or when he opened up to funkier grooves. Given a choice, The Story is a preferable pick to Gold as it gives a fuller portrait of Bo, but that doesn't mean that Gold is a bad compilation -- far from it, actually, as its 41 tracks are all first-rate, indicating the consistency of Diddley's catalog even if it doesn't quite hint at his range.