An on-stage performance usually warrants a positive audience. Unless it’s a competition, people tend not to boo, and even if they don’t like the performance, they typically applaud at the end. It can be difficult to gauge whether the crowd enjoyed it or not. A musician performing on the street with only his vocals and a guitar is privy to every smile, applause, and agitation of passersby.

“I still consider myself a sidewalk player,” said Dramond Washington, known on stage as TWURT. “A big part of my story and a lot of connections I’ve made came from right outside on the sidewall, just playing. Meeting strangers organically. There’s a fearlessness to it.”

Fearlessness drives his whole persona, and it’s allowed him to play around the country. TWURT started young, reciting his poems at church, basically rapping positivity to the congregation. Eventually, he taught himself how to play the guitar because no one else would play the loops he needed in a rap cadence, but he soon realized there was still something missing. He had a fondness for genres, but his music remains uplifting.

Music genres can dictate the tone, lyrics, and audience. It’s easy to be pigeonholed in the industry, but TWURT doesn’t adhere to any of it. His music is so eclectic that a grandmother once told him that his style is Country, Punk, Black, which he has adapted so much that it’s also the name of a recent documentary about his life, directed by Christopher C. Fisher.

“I grew up listening to gospel, blues, and eventually rap,” TWURT, which stands for The World’s (most) Unique Representation of Truth. “I grew up on the Tyone Davis and all that stuff, too. So as I got older, I got O.V. Wright, Johnny Taylor, Bobby Rush, and all the stuff I’ve been listening to, it’s already in me. The Muddy Waters and all the stuff your grandmother and your momma been playing. It’s in the roots. Mississippi is a very special place.”

Another place where TWURT spent a lot of time was Wisconsin. He spent every summer with a white family through an exchange program, living a completely different life from the one in Lexington, Mississippi. He was exposed to more Country and Rock in Wisconsin, but what stuck with him was that people aren’t that different. Despite the rooted connections, Country and Rock were not typically heard in his community, but he is a part of a movement to make a change.

“You have to challenge to evolve,” TWURT said. “We’ve excluded ourselves from jazz and all that, but I’m here to ‘unexclude’ us. I’m not the only one. There’s a real revolution going on right now.”