Guitar God

Henderson's guitars are as much pieces of fine arts as they are musical instruments. credit: photograph by Brie Williams

If you’re Wayne Henderson, life always circles back to the music. As he works steadily on his next guitar—No. 426—thinning the interior braces of its soundboard top with a hand chisel to “give it a bigger, deeper sound, because it can vibrate more,” he calls his chosen art form “old-timey” or “hillbilly.” But what comes out of Henderson—both musically and artistically—is far more interesting and cosmopolitan than that.

After all, Henderson—both a bluegrass musician and a luthier—of tiny Rugby, Virginia, has played his own handmade Henderson flat-tops at presidential inaugurations, the Smithsonian, and Carnegie Hall. Last year, when Queen Elizabeth visited the United States, Henderson and his band, Wayne Henderson & Friends, were asked to perform during Her Highness’s visit to Richmond.

But as Henderson talks of his travels and shifting circle of bandmates and fellow pickers (including Doc Watson and Gillian Welch), he never stops working and moving around his spacious brick workshop, a structure built with his 1995 National Endowment for the Arts heritage fellowship. “Right now, if I didn’t accept another guitar order, it’d probably take two years to get caught up,” he says. “But my problem is, if somebody wants one of my guitars, and they’re serious about it, well, I have to make them one…so the list just keeps growing.” Still, he works hard to keep even, now hand-making twenty-five to forty guitars a year.

With No. 426’s braces now thinned, Henderson lifts the soundboard off his worktable. He says the wafer-thin top is from a single plank of Appalachian red spruce that he’s “book split” and rejoined, leaving the reddish streaks in its grain like mirror images interrupted by the top’s sound hole. Then he taps it gently with his fingers. “You can hear it now, the tuning,” he says. “It no longer makes a thunk when it vibrates…there’s a light ringing sound there. That’s the thinned-out bracing.”

The depth and brightness of a Wayne Henderson guitar are what make it special. He modeled his initial design on classic instruments—“I learned how guitars work by repairing old Martins”—and he’s now refined it and made it uniquely his. Which is remarkable, given the thing is only wood, glue, a few metal strings and screws, a dozen bits of whittled ivory, and some narrow strips of tape-like binding to seal the guitar’s body.

Henderson, sixty-one, who was a career rural letter carrier until his retirement in 2002, has spent his life holding down two full-time jobs. Beginning in the early 1970s, he made his first guitars out of dresser-drawer bottoms and wooden boxes, “and at first I traded them for woodworking tools or guns.” Now, despite the fact that he sells his rosewood or koa-wood guitars for between $1,800 and $5,000, Henderson’s work sometimes bubbles up on eBay, with guitars going for $17,000 to $25,000 each. When asked why he doesn’t sell his instruments for more—reaping bigger profits—he thinks for a minute, blue eyes blinking. “Because,” he says, “then I couldn’t make guitars for my friends. They couldn’t afford them.” Of course, these days, his circle of “friends” stretches broadly to include not only the local pharmacist (eventual owner of No. 426) but also Eric Clapton (No. 326).

Still, Henderson acknowledges the larger satisfactions of his work. He walks to a closet and pulls out his Henderson No. 7. “It’s recently come back into my life,” he says. “It was the first guitar I made with rosewood, and that wood cost me eighteen dollars—a fortune to me back in 1977.”

He eventually sold the guitar to a local moonshiner for the “astronomical” amount of five hundred dollars and watched as it was traded around music festivals for the next thirty years. “Then, a year or so ago, a guy I know brought it back to me for repairs. It had been left out in the rain. It had a .22-caliber bullet hole through the back”—Henderson spins the guitar, showing off the still-existing hole. “And I bought it from him for two hundred dollars. Which was a good deal, seeing as how I’d sold it a few decades before for five hundred dollars.”

Henderson sits down on a bench—and begins fingerpicking. He’s plucking out chords for five or ten minutes, the guitar’s sound ringing richly through the workshop, the grain of its thirty-year-old varnished wood now richly aged, the bullet hole making not one whit of difference to its sound. “I carved the abalone inlays on this neck with my pocketknife,” he says, playing away. “It was slow work, but it still looks good.”

In another few minutes, he sets the guitar down, noting he needs to get back to work on No. 426. “Stradivari made an estimated 1,100 instruments in his lifetime,” Henderson says, yet another sly smile crossing his face. “I guess my plan is to catch him.”

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