![]() 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. 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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