John Lennon’s Stolen Harmonica And Where I Wish It Ended Up

John Lennon was given his first harmonica by his Uncle George Smith, Mimi’s husband.

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”:

Ransom Stoddard: You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?

Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

The second one (legend has it) he stole from a music store in Arnhem, which is part of the Netherlands.

There is a story in Martin Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home” about a young Bob Dylan disappearing with a ton a priceless and rare folk albums. When the owner finally caught up to him, Dylan could only sheepishly say, “You don’t understand, I need these albums,” and he did.

Harmonica playing seems like it should be easy. From what I’ve learned it is not. I think you basically need to have many depending on what key the song you are playing is in.

Stevie Wonder plays a really complicated type of harmonica that seems to me nearly impossible to just play much less master.

The one Lennon supposedly stole was made by the company HOHNER founded by Matthias Hohner in Trossingen, Germany in 1857. They still exist in some form, and of course you can go there and purchase their John Lennon signature model. You can look up the specifics, they don’t matter that much to me.

I do know that he wanted to sound like the guy in this song, Delbert McClinton, who may or may not have given Lennon one or more lessons..

I don’t know exactly what Beatles’ songs Lennon used that harmonica on, but apparently he definitely used it on “Love Me Do.”

This telling of the famous theft comes from the “The Beatles Bible” so it must be true because everything on the internet and everything in all bibles is true.

Allan Williams: We had time to kill so we went round the town centre and into a music shop, and when we came out they were all laughing their heads off. I said: ‘What’s the joke, lads?’, and John pulled out a mouth organ – he’d stolen a bloody mouth organ! I thought, ‘Christ, we’re never even going to get to Hamburg, we’ll all be in jail.’ The first time abroad and he had the audacity to rob a shop!

I found this from some other “reliable” place on the internet.

“Today, on a Dutch talk show an old lady who still runs a music instrument shop in Arnhem told that in the 80’s she heard the story of John stealing a mouth organ in Arnhem and realized that this had happened in her shop. She remembered some very strange looking English boys coming to her shop in the 60’s, wanting to look at some instruments, but buying nothing. Later she missed a mouth organ. She now sells the same model as ‘The Stolen One’.”

Whatever the true story, I have always thought it would have been incredibly cool if at some point John Lennon still had that harmonica and knew how valuable his use of it had made something that once could have been purchased for whatever the Dutch equivalent of pennies was at the time, and then saw to it that it was returned as a gift to its original owner.

I still would like to see that happen whether it be in the possession of Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon, Sean Lennon, someone with so much money they buy stuff to latch onto the legacy of art they loved, or perhaps especially the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The recipient could then do whatever they wanted with it.