![]() He won a contract with Columbia Records in 1968, which resulted in no fewer than three British hit singles. The lucky man was Don Partridge who, inspired by Jesse Fuller, started working as a one-man band. His ragtime-y bass lines fell somewhat short of virtuosity, but the dexterity required to co-ordinate Fuller's various instruments has rarely been matched before or since.ĭon Partridge's one-man band setup on his album cover ![]() ![]() His left foot, meanwhile, pumped a clattery hi-hat cymbal and, as if this wasn't hard enough while picking his guitar, he also played a harmonica and a kazoo which were strapped round his neck on a wire frame. Blues singer and songwriter Jesse Fuller, best known for his much loved "San Francisco Blues," tinkered the fotdella together in the early '50s to introduce more variety into his solo performances.įuller's fotdella looked like an upright bass with six strings, which were struck by hammers that he operated by using his right foot to manipulate pedals. Norris contrived his magnificent gizmo out of soapboxes, planks, pegs, pedals, strings, and kneepads surmounted by a large cogwheel, at which he sat bowing his fiddle with his kazoo clenched between his teeth.Īs the 20th century proceeded, further homemade contraptions such as the fotdella and the piatar or pitarbajo ushered in the extraordinary musicians we now think of as classic one-man bands. Norris has in his band two guitars, bells, bass fiddle, fiddle, and mouth harp or kazoo." Fate Norris of Dalton, Georgia, was described in a 1927 newspaper feature as "the one-man wonder, who plays six individual instruments in an individual band. One-man band Fate Norris performing in Dalton, GeorgiaĪmerican musicians, too, were fascinated by the possibilities of creating machines which could make one man sound like an entire group. So, by playing the pedals with my feet, I had full command of the bells, and made them accompany the violin, so that I could give any tune almost with the power of a band." "These hammers were connected with cords to a pedal, acting with a spring to bring itself up. "I had hammers fixed on a rail, so as each bell had its particular hammer," he explained. By the early 19th century, versatile individuals were knocking up an entertaining racket using fiddles, panpipes, a bass drum, and a tambourine.Ī blind London-based street musician, his name lost in the mists of antiquity, told the social researcher Henry Mayhew in 1850 that the unreliability of the members of his first band led him to invent a wheeled cart to which he fixed 14 bells. Delving back to the 13th century, there are records of street musicians who simultaneously played a three-holed flute and a drum. While Sheeran's achievements have been astounding, and despite whatever legions of his devotees might think, he did not invent the concept of the one-man band. Mostly he used just his Martin acoustic with Fishman pickups and his Chewie II Monsta Looper custom pedalboard, which enabled the ginger Godzilla of gadgetry to loop his guitar and voice and to add effects that made him sound more like an orchestra than one bloke with one box. Jaws around the globe hit the floor when Ed Sheeran started playing stadiums as a solo act.
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