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

When I was a kid in New Jer­sey, if you were look­ing for work, there’d be ads for musi­cians. In the mid-60s and 70s, they would invari­ably say: “Want­ed: Char­lie Watts type drum­mer” — Max Wein­berg

Since Char­lie Watts passed away last month, trib­ute upon trib­ute has poured in to cel­e­brate his style, his aus­tere sim­plic­i­ty, his role as the calm, steady eye of the Rolling Stones’ roil­ing storm. “Drum­ming is often ugly,” Aman­da Petru­sich wrote at The New York­er, “but Watts looked so beau­ti­ful when he played … His pos­ture alone sug­gest­ed a preter­nat­ur­al ele­gance … there is always poet­ry in restraint.”

This is the way Watts’ play­ing looks to non-musi­cians, and most Rolling Stones fans are not musi­cians, and do not lis­ten to rock drum­ming alone. “It’s pos­si­ble to find Watts’s iso­lat­ed drum tracks online,” Petru­sich writes, “If you’re into that sort of thing. They’re not always per­fect in the tech­ni­cal sense, but they are deeply per­fect in oth­er, less quan­tifi­able ways.” Watts him­self described his drum­ming as non-tech­ni­cal and decried his lack of train­ing. It was all about the band, he said repeat­ed­ly.

But ask oth­er drum­mers to quan­ti­fy Watts’ per­fec­tion and they’ll do so hap­pi­ly. Watts taught him­self to play by lis­ten­ing to his favorite jazz drum­mers, writes Max Wein­berg, “among them the great Eng­lish jazz drum­mer Phil Sea­men, and Dave Tough, an Amer­i­can drum­mer who even looked like Char­lie: a fas­tid­i­ous dress­er, appar­ent­ly with the most incred­i­ble groove and sound.” Wein­berg, who incor­po­rat­ed Watts’ influ­ence on Spring­steen songs like “Born to Run,” elab­o­rates fur­ther.

One way Watts com­mand­ed a room, he says, was as a pro­po­nent “of a style of rock drum­ming pop­u­lar­ized by the late, great Al Jack­son, the famous Stax drum­mer, where you delib­er­ate­ly play behind the direct back­beat. The way you do that — which is a lit­tle tech­ni­cal — is not by focus­ing on the two and the four beat, but the one and the three. Anoth­er exam­ple is James Brown’s music, which is heav­i­ly focused on land­ing on the one. It takes a long time to be able to do that.” He devel­oped the skill as a blues and jazz drum­mer even before Mick and Kei­th seduced him to the Stones.

Anoth­er drum celebri­ty admir­er, Stew­art Copeland, writes about Watts’ unique dynam­ics. As a rock drum­mer trained on jazz, he “went for groove, and derived pow­er from relax­ation. Most rock drum­mers are try­ing to kill some­thing; they’re chop­ping wood. Jazz drum­mers instead tend to be very loose to get that jazz feel, and he had that qual­i­ty.” While Mick strut­ted and dripped across the stage, Char­lie “hard­ly broke a sweat.” From this, Copeland learned that “you can actu­al­ly get a bet­ter sound out of your drums, and a bet­ter groove, if you relax.”

In the clas­sic drum tracks here, lis­ten for some of Watts’ dis­tinc­tive, sub­tle moves, and read more about his tech­nique in Copeland and Weinberg’s rem­i­nisces here. It’s fair to say that every rock drum­mer who came after Char­lie Watts learned some­thing from Char­lie Watts, whether they knew it or not. But while “you can ana­lyze Char­lie Watts,” Copeland writes, “that still won’t get you to his feel and his dis­tinct per­son­al­i­ty. It’s an X‑factor, it’s a charis­ma, it’s an unde­fin­able gift of God.” Petru­sich con­cludes her trib­ute with a sim­i­lar expres­sion of non-tech­ni­cal awe: “Watch­ing Watts play is still one of the best ways I know to check in with the rid­dle and thrill of art — to wit­ness some­thing mirac­u­lous but not to under­stand it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Say­ing Good­bye to Char­lie Watts (RIP), the Engine of the Rolling Stones for Half a Cen­tu­ry

A Char­lie Watts-Cen­tric View of the Rolling Stones: Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Footage of Char­lie & the Band Per­form­ing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line”

Rolling Stones Drum­mer Char­lie Watts Writes a Children’s Book Cel­e­brat­ing Char­lie Park­er (1964)

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

After Bri­an Wil­son cre­at­ed what Hen­drix called the “psy­che­del­ic bar­ber­shop quar­tet” sound of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, he moved on to what he promised would be anoth­er quan­tum leap beyond. “Our new album,” Smile, he claimed, “will be as much an improve­ment over Sounds as that was over Sum­mer Days.” But in his pur­suit to almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly sur­pass the Bea­t­les in the art of stu­dio per­fec­tion­ism, Wil­son over­reached. He famous­ly scrapped the Smile ses­sions, and instead released the hasti­ly-record­ed Smi­ley Smile to ful­fill con­tract oblig­a­tions in 1967.

Smi­ley Smile’s pecu­liar genius went unrec­og­nized at the time, par­tic­u­lar­ly because its cen­ter­piece, “Good Vibra­tions,” had set expec­ta­tions so high. Record­ed and released as a sin­gle in 1966, the song would be referred to as  a “pock­et sym­pho­ny” (a phrase invent­ed either by Wil­son him­self or pub­li­cist Derek Tay­lor). Even the jad­ed ses­sion play­ers who sat in for the hours of record­ing — vet­er­ans from the famed “Wreck­ing Crew” — knew they were mak­ing some­thing that tran­scend­ed the usu­al rut of pop sim­plic­i­ty.

“We were doing two, three record dates a day,” says organ play­er Mike Melvoin, “and the lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion was, like, not real­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed at all.” The “Good Vibra­tions” ses­sions were anoth­er expe­ri­ence entire­ly. “All of a sud­den, you walk in, and here’s run-on songs. It’s like this sec­tion fol­lowed by that sec­tion fol­lowed by this sec­tion, and each of them with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter. And you’re going, ‘Whoa.’” Wreck­ing Crew bassist Car­ol Kay, who sat in for the ses­sions but didn’t make the final mix, remem­bers think­ing, “that wasn’t your nor­mal rock ‘n’ roll…. You were part of a sym­pho­ny.”

Wilson’s pop sym­phonies were cre­at­ed and arranged not on paper but dur­ing the record­ing ses­sions them­selves, which account­ed for the 90 hours of tape and tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in expens­es, the most mon­ey ever spent on a pop sin­gle. He made cre­ative deci­sions accord­ing to what he called “feels,” frag­ments of melody and sound that formed his avant-garde pas­tich­es. “Each feel rep­re­sent­ed a mood or an emo­tion I’d felt,” he recalled, “and I planned to fit them togeth­er like a mosa­ic.” Not every­one could see the plan at first.

But when Wil­son final­ly emerged from months of iso­la­tion after cut­ting and mix­ing hours and hours of tape, the rest of the band was “very blown out,” he says. “They were most blown out. They said, ‘God­damn, how can you pos­si­bly do this, Bri­an?’ I said, ‘Some­thing got inside of me.’… They go, ‘Well, it’s fan­tas­tic.’ And so they sang real­ly good just to show me how much they liked it.” In the edit­ed footage at the top, tak­en over the six months of record­ing in four dif­fer­ent stu­dios, you can see drum­mer Hal Blaine, organ play­er Mick Melvoin, dou­ble bass play­er Lyle Ritz, and the Beach Boys them­selves all record­ing their parts.

To the press, Wil­son told one sto­ry — “Good Vibra­tions” was “still stick­ing pret­ty close to that same boy-girl thing, you know, but with a dif­fer­ence. And it’s a start, it’s def­i­nite­ly a start.” But the song — which he first want­ed to call “Good Vibes” — is very much meant to sug­gest “the healthy ema­na­tions that should result from psy­chic tran­quil­i­ty and inner peace,” wrote Bruce Gold­en in The Beach Boys: South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Pas­toral. In that sense, “Good Vibra­tions” was aspi­ra­tional, almost trag­i­cal­ly so, for Wil­son, who could not ful­fill its promis­es. Yet, in anoth­er sense, “Good Vibra­tions” is itself the ful­fill­ment of Wilson’s cre­ative promise, an eter­nal­ly bril­liant “pock­et sym­pho­ny” — and as Wil­son told engi­neer Chuck Britz dur­ing the ses­sions, his “whole life per­for­mance in one track.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Mag­ic of the Beach Boys’ Har­monies: Hear Iso­lat­ed Vocals from “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” & Oth­er Pet Sounds Clas­sics

The Beach Boys’ Bri­an Wil­son & Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er George Mar­tin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Great­est Song Ever Writ­ten”

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

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

When I was a wee lad I was inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of rock and roll. Where did it come from? Who start­ed it? But also when I was wee, there didn’t seem to be a lot of infor­ma­tion around, cer­tain­ly not in my library down­town. But when Mud­dy Waters died in 1983, I start­ed to under­stand that rock and roll was sped-up blues, and pieces start­ed to slot togeth­er. How­ev­er, women weren’t part of the equa­tion. (Blame Rolling Stone Mag­a­zine).

That’s a long way of say­ing the Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe should be bet­ter known than she is, espe­cial­ly as one dubbed the God­moth­er of Rock and Roll. Play­ing scratchy, dis­tort­ed elec­tric gui­tar and singing as if on a direct line to heav­en, Tharpe would go on to influ­ence every­body from Elvis Pres­ley to Chuck Berry, and every­body who came after her. So why is she not more of a house­hold name?

The 2011 BBC doc­u­men­tary above (split into four 15-minute chunks) resus­ci­tates a leg­end who not only played a mean gui­tar but set the stan­dard for the gospel-crossover artist, mak­ing a name on the gospel cir­cuit, but mak­ing her fame in the sec­u­lar night­clubs of Amer­i­ca. Tharpe’s dis­tinc­tion is that she returned to gospel with­out los­ing any of her edge.

A pre­co­cious young­ster in Arkansas dur­ing the ear­ly 1920s, she became the star of her Pen­te­costal church start­ing at four years old. Raised by her moth­er, then forced into an arranged mar­riage at 19-years-old to an old­er preach­er, Thomas Tharpe, she kept his name when she left their abu­sive mar­riage. She and her moth­er relo­cat­ed to Chica­go, where blues and jazz were inter­min­gling in a hot­house cul­ture. Dec­ca signed her, and although she told her church­go­ing friends that she had to sing these sec­u­lar songs because of that darned sev­en-year con­tract, Tharpe rose to fame quick­ly. The footage of her singing in front of the Cot­ton Club band led by Lucky Millinder is one of a cheeky, charm­ing 23 year old.

As the doc makes clear, Tharpe had a rebel­lious streak, didn’t do what she was told, and pushed bound­aries in a very seg­re­gat­ed Amer­i­ca. She invit­ed the all-white Jor­danaires to tour with her, sur­pris­ing house man­agers and book­ing agents alike. And she car­ried on a love affair and cre­ative part­ner­ship with fel­low gospel singer Marie Knight for decades, very much on the down low.

So per­haps this is the rea­son Tharpe has not been on our col­lec­tive radar—we’ve been slow to admit that rock gui­tar was cre­at­ed by a queer black woman devot­ed to the Lord. Nobody in the audi­ence knew this, though, at the aban­doned rail­way sta­tion at Wilbra­ham Road, Man­ches­ter, in May 1964. On one side of the station’s tracks, British teenagers were gath­ered to hear raw, rock and roll from Amer­i­ca. On the oth­er side, Tharpe stands with her gui­tar, wear­ing a thick coat to pro­tect her from the spring rain. Backed by her band, she chan­nels a holy force and sings about the rain of the Great Flood, the lyrics abstract and repet­i­tive, as if in a trance. The footage opens the doc­u­men­tary and makes as good a case as any of why Tharpe should be part of the pan­theon of rock roy­al­ty. (You can see the whole clip here.) Back in the States, Tharpe had been eclipsed by Mahalia Jack­son, but the Brits didn’t know any of that. They just sense they’ve tapped into one of the sources for the music explod­ing around them.

It took until 2018 for Tharpe to be induct­ed into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, years after all those white boy copy­cats. Now is the time to re-dis­cov­er her and hear what you’ve been miss­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

An Intro­duc­tion to Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

Mud­dy Waters and Friends on the Blues and Gospel Train, 1964

Watch the Hot Gui­tar Solos of Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

Revis­it The Life & Music of Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe: ‘The God­moth­er of Rock and Roll’

The Women of Rock: Dis­cov­er an Oral His­to­ry Project That Fea­tures Pio­neer­ing Women in Rock Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Char­lie Watts, the Rolling Stones’ icon­ic drum­mer since 1962, passed away yes­ter­day from unspec­i­fied caus­es at the age of 80. His death is a great loss for rock and roll. “When Char­lie Watts dies, the beat stops,” Rob Harvil­la writes at the Ringer, “nev­er to be played again with such mes­mer­iz­ing force, with such ultra-suave propul­sion, with such casu­al­ly indomitable rad­ness.” These are not tech­ni­cal terms, and Watts was not a tech­ni­cal drum­mer. “I’m not a para­did­dle man,” he said in 2000. “It’s not tech­ni­cal, it’s emo­tion­al. One of the hard­est things of all is to get that feel­ing across.”

Watts per­fect­ed the inde­fin­able feel of rock and roll by way of jazz, play­ing along to his favorite records by Char­lie Park­er — first with a set of wire brush­es on an unstrung ban­jo, then on the first drum kit his father bought him.

From the greats, he learned to swing and mas­tered dynam­ics. The com­mand­ing mar­tial crack of Watts’ snare held a band of mot­ley pirates togeth­er — with­out him, the Stones might have dis­solved into a col­lec­tion of preen­ing antics and wan­der­ing blues licks; with him at the cen­ter, they coa­lesced into a team. “I don’t know how the hell that old suck­er got to be so good,” Keef mar­veled.

Watts would be the last one to talk about how good he was — he hat­ed inter­views and star­dom in gen­er­al. “I’ve nev­er been inter­est­ed in all that stuff and still am not,” he said. “I don’t know what show­biz is and I’ve nev­er watched MTV. There are peo­ple who just play instru­ments, and I’m pleased to know that I’m one of them.” His sin­gu­lar focus came from lis­ten­ing intent­ly to what oth­ers were doing, as he says in the inter­view at the top, and copy­ing what they did, a method he calls “one of my flaws…. I learned by watch­ing.” But the means by which Watts learned to play made him the per­fect drum­mer for the Stones. He watched, lis­tened, learned the songs, then played them per­fect­ly in tune with the band, keep­ing them in time while respond­ing dynam­i­cal­ly to Richards and Jagger’s inter­play.

“I should have gone to school and learned how to do it,” Watts says, with typ­i­cal self-dep­re­ca­tion. Instead, he made his school the jazz clubs of Lon­don and Paris, where he went to see Bud Pow­ell’s drum­mer Ken­ny Clark. Just as he’d done in his room on his first drum kit, he lis­tened intent­ly and copied what he heard. Watts looked like a man who stood apart from the band, with his world-weary expres­sion, end­less col­lec­tion of sharp suits and reserved demeanor. But when he played with the Stones, they locked togeth­er. It was love, he said, “I love this band.”

His life was a tes­ta­ment to the vital­i­ty of the music that made him, at 80, still want to go back on the road after announc­ing just two weeks ago that he’d have to sit out this year’s tour. Forty years ago, Watts couldn’t fore­see the band he helped make world famous last­ing very much longer. “I nev­er thought it would last five min­utes,” he said in 1981, “but I fig­ured I’d live that five min­utes to the hilt because I love them. They’re big­ger than I am if you real­ly want to know. I admire them, I like them as friends, I argue with them and I love them…. I don’t real­ly care if it stops…. “ Now that he’s gone, it’s hard to see how the Stones can go on.

As near­ly every mem­ber of the band, espe­cial­ly Richards, has said at one time or anoth­er, no Char­lie Watts, no Rolling Stones. “Charlie’s the engine,” said Ron­nie Wood in the Stones doc­u­men­tary Tip of the Tongue. “We don’t go any­where with­out the engine.” Wher­ev­er they go now, there’s no ques­tion the Rolling Stones would have been a dif­fer­ent band entire­ly with­out him. See some of his best live moments in the clips above and learn what Char­lie him­self thought of his play­ing in the short doc­u­men­tary at the top, “If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” a record of his approach to drum­ming and life in gen­er­al that cap­tures the true spir­it of a rock leg­end.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Char­lie Watts-Cen­tric View of the Rolling Stones: Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Footage of Char­lie & the Band Per­form­ing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line”

Rolling Stones Drum­mer Char­lie Watts Writes a Children’s Book Cel­e­brat­ing Char­lie Park­er (1964)

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

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