Bman's Blues Report

Big John Wrencher (February 12, 1923 - July 15, 1977), also known as One Arm John, was an American blues harmonica player and singer, well known for playing on Maxwell Street Market, Chicago in the 1960s, and who later toured Europe in the 1970s.John Thomas Wrencher was born in Sunflower, Mississippi, United States. He became interested in music as a child, and taught himself to play harmonica at an early age, and from the early 1940s was working as an itinerant musician in Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois. By the mid 1940s he had arrived in Chicago and was playing on Maxwell Street and at house parties with Jimmy Rogers, Claude "Blue Smitty" Smith and John Henry Barbee. In the 1950s he moved to Detroit, where he worked with singer/guitarist Baby Boy Warren, and formed his own trio to work in the Detroit and Clarksdale, Mississippi areas. In 1958 Wrencher lost his left arm as a result of a car accident outside Memphis, Tennessee. By the early 1960s he had settle...