It ain’t no town, and it ain’t no city.<\/p>\n
It was<\/em> a place, though, at least in the imaginations of southern African-Americans in the early 20th century–as real as East Jabip was in my white Jewish neighborhood in Philadelphia, or the lovely burg of Bumfuck to my South Jersey friends.<\/p>\n But while our far-flung imaginary locales were typically backwater towns in the middle of nowhere, Diddy Wah Diddy was a utopia in which its residents wanted for nothing.<\/p>\n So when Bo Diddley wrote and recorded a song about his unattainably amorous love interest, he set it in the perfect place.<\/p>\n