PORT TOWNSEND — Wayne Henderson feels naked without his guitar.
“I’ve been playing since I was 5 years old,” said Henderson, now 64.
“I feel comfortable with a guitar in my hand, even if I am not playing it,” he said.
“Holding a guitar is something that feels very natural to me.”
Henderson — recipient of a 1995 National Heritage Award presented by the National Endowment for the Arts — is one of the featured performers and instructors at this year’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes which continues at Fort Worden State Park through Saturday.
This naked feeling is common to guitarists, but Henderson is unique in that he essentially makes his own clothes.
He not only can hold his own as a musician accompanying some of the best fiddlers in the world but also has built a reputation as a luthier, having built 540 guitars from his home in Grayson County, Va.
He sells his guitars for about $2,000. They have earned renown and draw a stiff price on auction sites, but Henderson doesn’t see any profit from those.
“I have a terrible head for business,” he said.
“And I don’t care about these eBay sales because I have enough to live on.”
He eventually got a Martin by trading one that he had made, and has assembled his own collection of rare Martin guitars.
He has also on occasion used a guitar as a payment for other services, such as an addition for his house.
Made first guitar at 16.
Henderson has made his first guitar when he was 16, after years of experimenting and tests.
It became a serious hobby, eventually working its way into a career.
In the meantime, Henderson earned his livelihood as a postal carrier in rural Virginia, where he worked for 32 years.
“It was a great job because I got done early and could spend a lot of time in my shop,” he said.
Building his first guitar, which he still owns, was a necessity.
“I lived on a small farm where we needed to grow what we needed and fend for ourselves,” he said.
“We did pretty good, but when I wanted a guitar I didn’t have enough money to go out and buy a Martin, so the only choice was to build a guitar myself.”
He couldn’t afford the right wood for guitar building, but he noticed that laminate lined his mother’s dresser drawers.
So he removed the drawer’s bottom, stuck it in a creek overnight and peeled off the laminate.
After he dried it off, he returned the piece to the dresser and his mother was none the wiser, although “she heard the story several times after we both got old.”
Henderson learned quickly and the seventh guitar he built was a work of art, complete with abalone shell inlays.
It was “a pretty good copy of a Martin D-45,” he said.
One day, he was at his grandmother’s house during a visit from the local moonshiner and a scary looking stranger who expressed interest in the guitar.
“This guy said it was the best guitar he had ever played,” Henderson said.
“Even though he scared me, I was really pleased that he was bragging on my guitar.”
When the scary stranger asked how much the guitar would cost, Henderson asked for an astronomical price just to get rid of the guy, but he returned the next day with $500, “which was more money than I’d ever seen.”
He still owns seven of his own guitars.
He gets orders every day and said he won’t live long enough to fill all of them.
He keeps customers waiting for years even before agreeing to provide them with an instrument.
One of those kept waiting was Eric Clapton, who finally got his own Henderson Guitar seven years after playing one in a New York studio.
Henderson has never met Clapton.
“He has people who do things for him,” Henderson said.
“It would be easier to meet the president than to meet Eric Clapton.
“But I’d just as soon make a guitar for my neighbor who has been waiting seven years than drop everything and make one for Eric Clapton.”
The process was documented in Clapton’s Guitar, a 2006 book by Alan St. John that profiled Henderson.
The book contains a lot of detail about Henderson’s technique, but he hadn’t made an effort to preserve his knowledge and abilities for future generations until his daughter, 25-year-old Elizabeth Jayne Henderson, came to him with a request.
She wanted a guitar she could sell on ebay to pay off her $25,000 student loan for law school.
Henderson gave his permission as long as she built the guitar herself.
She built it, sold it and liked it enough to continue.
She has made three guitars, and is less tolerant of all the “musicians and general loafers” who hang around the shop, Henderson said.
“A lot of people come around to talk, but if they stay more than a little while, I put them to work,” he said.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
