Meet Brushy One String, the One String Guitar Player Who Will Blow Your Mind

When Jamaican musi­cian Andrew Chin, bet­ter known as Brushy One String first told friends about his vision — “a dream in which he was told to play the one-string gui­tar” — they respond­ed with mock­ery — all but one, who “insist­ed it was fate,” writes Play­ing for Change, “and that he had to make that dream come true.” So Brushy set out to do just that, play­ing on street­corners and in the mar­ket, “in a big broad hat and sun­glass­es,” he says. The music came to him nat­u­ral­ly. He is no ordi­nary street musi­cian, how­ev­er, and his one-string gui­tar is not a gim­mick. Brushy is a tal­ent­ed singer-song­writer, with a pow­er­ful voice and a musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty that tran­scends his bare-bones min­i­mal­ism.

He does­n’t look par­tic­u­lar­ly flashy, perched on the street with his beat-up gui­tar in the video at the top for “Chick­en in the Corn.” Brushy came of age in a scene “where most per­form­ers long to be hip-hop MCs or dance­hall style DJs.”

Brushy’s one-string tech­nique reach­es back to the ori­gins of the blues in the Did­dley Bow (from which Bo Did­dley took his name), and even fur­ther back into musi­cal his­to­ry, recall­ing what musi­col­o­gists would call a “mono­chord zither.” One-string play­ers in his­to­ry have includ­ed Mis­sis­sip­pi blues­man Eddie “One String” Jones, Lon­nie Pitch­ford, and Willie Joe Dun­can, who invent­ed the Uni­tar, an elec­tri­fied one-string gui­tar and scored a hit in the 1950s.

Whether or not Brushy fits him­self into this tra­di­tion, he “came by his musi­cal abil­i­ties hon­est­ly,” play­ing a reg­gae infused soul-meets-Delta Blues inspired by his par­ents. His father was Jamaican soul singer Fred­dy McK­ay and his moth­er, Bev­er­ly Fos­ter, toured as a back­up singer with Tina Turn­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, he was orphaned at a young age and unable to fin­ish his edu­ca­tion. He did­n’t learn to read at all until he became an adult. Brushy tried to learn gui­tar, but “I did­n’t real­ly know how to play,” he says, “and I played so hard, all the strings broke. So the gui­tar went under the bed” until his one string epiphany. As he began to sing and play, his one, low‑E string and the wood­en body of his acoustic gui­tar became a rhythm sec­tion, his expan­sive voice ris­ing up between beats, “a voice so rich and full,” NPR writes, “all it wants is a bit of rhyth­mic and melod­ic under­pin­ning.”

Brushy names both soul leg­end Ted­dy Pen­der­grass and dance­hall leg­end Shab­ba Ranks as influ­ences, a key to the range of his song­writ­ing, which comes “from the sit­u­a­tions I’m in,” he says. “It’s like mag­ic: From the sit­u­a­tion, I don’t search for some­thing, not in my head or nowhere else. The song just comes.” He had some ear­ly mod­est suc­cess, did a tour of Japan, then returned to his home­town of Ochoa Rios to kick around and play local­ly. It was then that film­mak­er Luciano Blot­ta encoun­tered him while fin­ish­ing the 2007 Jamaican music doc­u­men­tary, Rise Up. “Chick­en in the Corn” made the sound­track, and it turned into Brushy’s big break.

He’s since played South by South­west, New Orleans House of Blues, and the New Orleans Jazz & Her­itage Fes­ti­val, had a doc­u­men­tary made about him — The King of One String (2014) — and released three stu­dio albums and a live album. It’s well deserved suc­cess for a musi­cian who was ready to quit music until he had a dream — and who then found the courage (and the good luck) to make it real.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Richards Shows Us How to Play the Blues, Inspired by Robert John­son, on the Acoustic Gui­tar

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar: See the Evo­lu­tion of the Gui­tar in 7 Instru­ments

The Ency­clo­pe­dia Of Alter­nate Gui­tar Tun­ings

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness