Wayne Henderson is a true American original. He is a world-class guitar builder. He is also world-class guitar player. And that makes him unquestionably the lone member of a club of one: Stradivari and Paganini in a pair of glue-stained Carhartts.
[+]Wayne Henderson is a true American original. He is a world-class guitar builder. He is also world-class guitar player. And that makes him unquestionably the lone member of a club of one: Stradivari and Paganini in a pair of glue-stained Carhartts.
Wayne Henderson was born in 1947 in Rugby, Virginia, a tiny town tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just a few hundred yards from the North Carolina border. The population of Rugby is seven, and legend has it, always has been. As Wayne tells it “The town’s so small that we have to take turns being the mayor, the preacher and the town drunk.” (Henderson is also a master storyteller as well.)
Wayne grew up on a farm just down the road from where he lives now. His dad Walter raised subsistence crops as well as tobacco, the cash crop of the day. His mother Sylvie raised the kids and tended the animals—including a pet turkey named Smedley. A good life, yes, but a hard life too. The other economic engine of the area was moonshine liquor, with the moonshiners knowing they could outrun the local authorities through the twisty back roads across the state line.
One of the constants of life in the mountains was music. Walt was an accomplished fiddler (his old time band won a ribbon at the very first Galax Fiddler’s Convention) but like most farmers stopped playing when he started raising a family. When his youngest son learned to play a few chords of backup, that encouraged Walt to pick up his fiddle and play with young Wayne. Wayne’s introduction to guitar making was similarly organic. He saw the big, shiny ’49 Martin D-28 that was owned by local music legend E.C. Ball (a guitar that has become one of his most precious possessions) and wanted one just like it.
With the hubris of youth, and a fair bit of natural talent (as a small child, he would carve his classmates initials in their pencils in trade for an apple) a teenaged Henderson set out to make his first guitar. He snuck into the house and removed the bottom of his mother’s dresser drawer. He took it down to the creek to soak off the veneer and returned it before she noticed it was gone. Working in a shed on the farm and using a few other parts cannibalized from his brother’s Silvertone, Wayne cobbled together a reasonable instrument,
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