Famed Grayson County guitar maker Wayne Henderson stages one final festival

Wayne Henderson sat in his cluttered, sawdust-frosted shop and sanded a piece of wood to make a guitar neck, just like he’s done 928 other times before.

His glasses pushed down on the bridge of his nose, he held a piece of mahogany across his lap and buffed the wood with a sander to make it flat and smooth for some lucky guitarist whose fingers will dance across that neck of the 929^th guitar Henderson has built in his 60-year career as an instrument maker.

“I make ’em faster and easier now,” Henderson said as he examined the neck that he’d soon add to the guitar body he’d already completed. “I guess I’ve made enough of ’em, I don’t have to think.”

He hand-built 32 guitars last year alone, all crafted in the small, brick Grayson County workshop he built in 1995 with the $10,000 he received from the National Endowment for the Arts, back when he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship for his contributions to Appalachian Mountains music as a both a musician and a guitar-builder. He said he’d like to eventually get to 1,000 guitars, which seems doable based on his current pace even at the age of 77.

“That’s a goal, for sure,” he said. “As long as I can keep kicking long enough.”

Another number stands out for Henderson this year — 30. As of this weekend, that’s the number of music festivals that have been held each year in his name at Grayson Highlands State Park. But Saturday’s 30^th annual Wayne C. Henderson Music Festival and Guitar Competition will be the last.

The intimate, one-day event, held in one of Virginia’s prettiest state parks near the commonwealth’s highest peak, Mount Rogers, has become a favorite among bluegrass and old-time mountain music lovers for its small scale and its big-name headliners that have included Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Doc Watson, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, the Quebe Sisters and even the Cajun band BeauSoleil. The festival attracted stars partly because some of the payment included a custom-built Henderson guitar, and those instruments are worth a lot of money these days.

But as a crew of volunteers and even Henderson himself have gotten older, the chore of planning the event has become more taxing, and not enough younger folks are willing to take it over.

“I’m 77 and I don’t have the energy I used to,” Henderson said. “And I have to make something like five guitars. We have a raffle: one for the contest, and then a couple to get people to come. It’s a lot of work.”

Saturday’s festival finale includes a lineup of bluegrass stalwarts: the Gibson Brothers and the Kruger Brothers, South Pacific slack-key guitarist L.T. Smooth and North Carolina guitarist Presley Barker, who won the Henderson guitar competition when he was just a teenager. Henderson, a virtuoso picker himself, usually closes the show, and this year he promises a “special guest,” whose identity is being kept secret until festival day.

The Henderson Festival has also served as a fundraiser for bluegrass and old-time mountain music programs for young people, which includes the successful Junior Appalachian Musicians education program that was started by Henderson’s longtime personal partner, Helen White, who died in 2019 at the age of 69.

Including money expected from Saturday’s event (last year, raffle tickets to win a Henderson guitar brought in $30,000 alone), the Henderson Festival will have raised more than a half-million dollars for music education in the past 30 years. He hopes to find other ways to keep raising money for kids’ programs after the festival ends.

The festival usually draws upward of 2,000 attendees. Because Saturday is the last one, state park officials and volunteers expect the crowd to possibly exceed those numbers, which could cause traffic delays along the winding U.S. 58 that leads to Grayson Highlands. (They don’t call Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail “The Crooked Road” for nothing, after all.) Park admission must be paid at the gate, then tickets are purchased inside the park, which could cause snarls for late arrivers.

Many fans will be there simply to pay tribute to Henderson, who has played on stages ranging from New York City’s Carnegie Hall to Roanoke’s Jefferson Center to the Mount Rogers Fire and Rescue Squad’s Ramp Festival. He is a multiple winner at the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax, and he’s even had a book written about his work. Along the way, he has become something of a cultural ambassador for the region he has called home for most of his 77 years.

“He is the face of the music of Southwest Virginia,” said Emily Spencer, a musician and teacher from the nearby community of Whitetop who has known Henderson since 1975. “You can’t calculate how much he has meant to this region. He’s truly a national treasure.”

Life in Rugby

They call this tiny speck of a place Rugby, a community so small that Henderson has often joked that the few residents took turns being the mayor, preacher, teacher and town drunk. (Jokes are a big part of Henderson’s stage show.)

He lives in a brick house near where he grew up, having carved out a life and career of music and guitars from the same fertile land where he worked as a kid picking tobacco and milking cows. He farmed a few years as an adult, then became a full-time mail carrier until he retired in 2002, which allowed more time for music and instrument-making.

His father, Walter, played fiddle, and his mother, Sylvia, came from a family of musicians. Henderson started playing guitar at age 5, and as a farmboy learned a few musical tricks that helped lighten the workload.

“We’d be on the hill working in the tobacco patch, and I’d be hot and worn out, and if I mentioned, ‘Let’s go to the house and play some tunes,’ well, that was the only thing in the world that would stop him from working,” Henderson said of his father.

“Well, we might take a little while and go do that,” his father would say.

“I guess he didn’t have anybody to play with him, “Henderson said. “But I discovered that’d work pretty good.”

Barely a half-mile down the road stood a country store owned by Estil Cortez “E.C.” Ball. In addition to being a merchant, Ball was a wonderful guitar picker who owned the best guitar around: a C.F. Martin acoustic, a must-have for any bluegrass picker. Ball and his wife, Orna, were recorded between the 1930s and the ’60s by folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan. He played in an innovative style in which he wore a thumb pick, instead of holding a pick between his fingers, and he played with his thumb, index and middle fingers, plucking out rolling melodies. Henderson was influenced by Ball, and to this day plays a three-finger style with a thumbpick.

As a kid, Henderson liked to whittle, and he carved figures, toys and baseball bats from wood. He mixed music and woodworking at a young age, when he made his first guitar out of a wooden plank, some fishing line and a cardboard box that held cans of snuff. When he was 12, he traced an outline of Ball’s C.F. Martin on a piece of wood and worked on making a guitar in the summer heat, when one day the humidity caused the sides to bow outward “like a morning glory,” Henderson said.

His father, seeing his son’s disappointment, took him across the state line to Lansing, North Carolina, to meet a fellow he knew by the name of Albert Hash, a renowned machinist, musician and fiddle maker. Hash showed Henderson how to bend heated wood and told him what kind of glue to use, and he gave the kid an old door for wood. A year later, Henderson took a finished guitar back to Hash.

“Boy, if I’d known you’d done such a good job, I would’ve given you better wood,” Hash told him.

From then, Henderson played music and built guitars. His guitar bodies are based on Martin guitars, the quintessential bluegrass music guitar. He worked briefly in Nashville for the famed Gruhn Guitars shop, where one day, one of Elvis Presley’s guitars was brought in for some maintenance. Henderson said that he and every worker in the shop made at least one minor repair, such as filing a bridge, just so they could say they worked on Elvis’ guitar.

He lived in Smyth County during his first marriage, divorced, then settled back in Rugby where he delivered mail, played music and built guitars.

Then, the Eric Clapton story started making the rounds. And then somebody wrote a book about it. And, boy, did things change.

Clapton’s guitar

Clapton, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist and singer, never actually called Henderson about ordering a guitar from him.

Around 1995, a man named Tim Duffy, who started the North Carolina-based Music Maker Foundation to benefit older blues musicians, met Clapton to talk about getting his support for the nonprofit. He showed Clapton a Henderson guitar, which the guitarist played and said he liked. Duffy told Clapton he could get him a custom-built Henderson.

Nearly a decade later, Henderson still had not started work on a guitar for Eric Clapton.

Now, here is the thing to know about Wayne Henderson: if you ask him to build a guitar for you, he might agree to do it, but you might not get an instrument for 10 years … if ever. His work backlog is famous among guitar players. Inside his shop, Henderson has a row of shelves with order slips and papers stuffed inside alphabetized cubbies — dozens, maybe a hundred or more, orders submitted by people who might have a better chance winning a Powerball drawing than ever getting a Henderson guitar.

But Eric Clapton? Henderson couldn’t move him to the top of the list? To Henderson, Clapton was just another guitarist who had to wait his turn.

Then, New York-based writer Allen St. John heard about the Clapton story and persuaded Henderson to build the guitar so that he could document the project in a book — which he did in “Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument” (Penguin/Random House 2005). Henderson built the guitar, the book was a hit, and the story made Henderson even more famous as a luthier (the fancy name for instrument maker).

With the explosion of internet markets on online auctions, Henderson guitars now sell for incredible prices, tens of thousands of dollars. Today, on a website called Carter Vintage, you can buy a 1992 Henderson guitar for $58,995.

On the popular instrument marketplace Reverb, a 2009 Henderson is listed at $42,500. Two other Henderson guitars are priced at $34,000 and $19,999.

“Ever since that book came out, the prices went sky high,” Henderson said. “I can’t even get one of ’em myself if I wanted to buy it back.”

Twenty years ago, Henderson built and sold guitars for hundreds of dollars. Today, he asks perhaps $3,000 for a new guitar, maybe as much as $10,000 for a special job, knowing that his guitars are going for many times that amount online.

“I try to make enough to keep my shop going,” he said. “If it was just a money deal, I’m afraid it would feel like a job and not my artwork.”

Guitar-making has been passed on to the next Henderson generation. His daughter, Jayne, who hung around her father’s shop occasionally when she was a kid, decided to build a guitar herself to help pay off law school debt. Her first guitar brought $25,000, her dad said, and she now runs her own luthier shop in Asheville, North Carolina, where she builds guitars and ukuleles.

As for Clapton’s guitar, Henderson isn’t sure if the rock legend ever plays it. He doesn’t think that Clapton sold it during one of his charity auctions that benefit a drug rehab center.

“I think he’s evidently still got it,” Henderson said.

Legacies and prodigies

People had approached Henderson about hosting a music festival for years before he agreed to attach his name to an event if it served two goals: it would be held at Grayson Highlands State Park, and it would raise money for kids who want to learn traditional mountain music.

Legendary picker Doc Watson, a close friend who could occasionally be found hanging around Henderson’s shop, played the first festival, which put the event on solid footing. Over the years, children have applied for grants from the nonprofit organization that runs the festival, which are usually doled out in individual scholarship awards of $500. Organizations might receive $1,000 or more.

The festival is expected to give away $84,000 this year, said Becky Ward, the nonprofit’s president who is also one of Henderson’s Grayson County cousins — which means the Wayne Henderson Festival is a true family affair. She said that ending the festival is bittersweet, but that 30 years is a good run.

“He’s tired of worrying about it,” said Ward, who is also a musician. “Thirty is a good year to end it on. Without Wayne, there is no festival. The great guitar pickers all come to compete in hopes of taking home a Henderson guitar.”

Ward believes that Henderson’s support of music education will be the festival’s legacy, which she says is visible today in the popularity of youth competitions at many of the major fiddlers’ conventions. From the Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax to the Mount Airy (North Carolina) Fiddlers Convention to the Old-Time Fiddlers Convention in Boone, North Carolina, and beyond, youth categories are now considered a regular part of the competitions, and youth nights are among the most popular events of a festival.

“Youth competitions have exploded,” Ward said. “A big part of that is because our scholarships have increased tenfold.”

Even more credit is due to the Junior Appalachian Musicians, or JAM, program that Helen White, Henderson’s longtime partner, started in North Carolina. The festival has supported many of those programs from South Carolina to Virginia, mostly in the mountains.

White died of a heart attack in 2019, a loss that forever stings. White was a fiddle player, and she and Henderson were not only a romantic pair, but music buddies, too.

“You lose your partner for 32 years and that’s a hard deal for anybody,” Henderson said. “We never was married and she had her own house … and I had mine … and that might be one reason we got along good. But we did everything together and, to me, losing my picking partner is another deal on top of everything else.”

It’s then that Henderson names other people he has lost in recent years who were close to him. His brother and sister, for instance. Also Don Wilson and Gerald Anderson, two close friends who worked with Henderson in the shop. But the music plays on.

“I feel this terrible loss for losing all those folks you know that were super close to me,” he said. “But I know you can’t let stuff like that stop you from doing what you have to do. And pretty much what I do is I work in this shop, and it keeps me busy and my mind occupied. And I try to not worry about things too much. And I still go out and play music once in a while.”

Spencer, his friend from Whitetop who has shared a stage with Henderson many times, said that his humility and kindness are unwavering.

“He’s generous and he’s always the same,” Spencer said. “He is so humble. And he is generous with his time. You hardly go past his shop without seeing somebody there.”

These days, he has a little granddaughter who is learning to play ukulele, and sometimes she likes to hang around grandpa’s shop during visits.

And there’s still one more festival to host. And more guitars to build. And more guitar prodigies walking into his shop to meet the master and add their name to the list of folks who desperately want to own a Henderson guitar.

“The backlog is worse than ever,” he said. “And nowadays I tell people I probably won’t live long enough to get to it, but I’ll certainly try. A young fella came in here just today. And he could pick real good. He had to be just a teenager, I guess. Yeah. But he was an impressive player. I told him I’ll definitely make you a guitar. If I can work out some time to get to it. Maybe I’ll try a little harder than normal.”