Probably the most famous one-man band of the 20th century is also one of the world’s best known buskers - Don Partridge, a London street musician whose compositions cracked the UK pop charts three times in the ’60s. Bert belongs to the busker variation of the one-man band, a tradition that speaks to the genre’s street-corner roots. Bert is a goofy jack-of-all trades who sidelines as a street balladeer, playing a band-contraption consisting of a drums, trumpet, harmonica, bicycle horn, concertina and a tambourine which hangs demurely over his crotch. In the popular imagination, the one-man band looks something like Dick Van Dyke’s Bert, the pseudo-cockney chimneysweep in Disney’s 1964 musical, Mary Poppins.
It takes guts and tenacity, and a willingness to be weird. It takes a unique and committed musician to attempt the one-man-band act. We can assume this safely because those are the traits shared by every one-man-band who has ever strapped a bass drum to his back and levers by which to beat it to his feet.
If the medieval music scene was at all comparable to today’s, we can assume that whomever invented the one-man band did so because his drummer quit on him two hours before a gig and, too stubborn (or too broke) to call off the show, our troubadour rigged up something janky and took the stage alone, thus facing showbiz’ ever-present uncertainty with ingenuity, humor and a sense of determination so fierce it was, I will assume, a little unsettling.
#One man band act how to#
No one will ever know who the first one-man band was, because the figure dates back to at least the Middle Ages, when some anonymous but enterprising troubadour figured out how to play a flute and a snare drum at the same time.
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