('John Thomas Wrencher)
(3CDs)
(3CDs)
BIOGRAPHY
John Thomas Wrencher was born in Sunflower, Mississippi. He became
interested in music as a child and taught himself to play the harmonica
at an early age. Beginning in the early 1940s, he worked 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 the
singer and guitarist Baby Boy Warren and formed his own trio, which
performed in the Detroit area and in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
In 1958 Wrencher lost his left arm as a result of a car accident
outside Memphis, Tennessee. By the early 1960s he had settled in
Chicago, where he became a fixture on Maxwell Street Market, in
particular playing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sundays. In 1964 he
appeared in a documentary film about Maxwell Street, entitled And This
Is Free; performances by Wrencher recorded in the process of making the
film were eventually issued on a three-CD set, And This Is Maxwell
Street. During the 1960s he recorded for the Testament label backing
Robert Nighthawk and as part of the Chicago String Band.
In 1969 he recorded for Barrelhouse Records, backed by the guitarist
Little Buddy Thomas and the drummer Playboy Vinson, who formed his
Maxwell Street band at that time. The resulting album, Maxwell Street
Alley Blues, was described as "superlative in every regard" by Cub Koda,
writing for Allmusic. Wrencher toured Europe with the Chicago Blues
Festival in 1973 and with the American Blues Legends in 1974. On the
latter tour he recorded an album in London for Big Bear Records, backed
by the guitarist Eddie Taylor and his band.
During a trip to Mississippi to visit his family in July 1977, Wrencher
died suddenly of a heart attack in Wade Walton's barbershop in
Clarksdale, Mississippi. (Wikipedia)