FRETS Visits... Sugar Grove, VA
By Richard McFalls
Through all the years that the people of the Appalachians have been playing old-time and
bluegrass music, they also have been making instruments to produce that music. The
tradition of the Appalachian luthier is a rich, respected one, and it continues to flourish
in the work of Wayne Henderson of Rugby, Virginia.
Henderson has been building guitars and mandolins for more than 15 years, with a skill that
has earned him a reputation as an outstanding luthier and repairman. The materials, the
craftsmanship, and the tone of his pieces are in keeping with the traditions that have
made pre-war vintage acoustic instruments so highly prized. The Smithsonian Institution has
displayed one of his guitars, and has sent him around the country and to Canada to
demonstrate his craft.
Henderson, 34, has always lived near Rugby. The community, nestled in the Blue Ridge
Mountains about 25 miles west of Galax in southwestern Virginia, is found on few maps.
Henderson resides in Sugar Grove, a few miles north of Rugby.
As a child Henderson made most of his own toys, whittling them with a pocket knife. His
father and grandfather played old-time music on fiddle and banjo, and Wayne learned his
first guitar chords at age five on an old Recording King guitar. At age 14 he wanted
something better than the Recording King; so he built a guitar of his own.
That first guitar, put together from pieces of walnut veneer, took about a year. "I didn't
have anything to make it out of, so I stole the bottom out of a drawer in one of Mom's
dressers," he says. "I laid it out in the creek all night and let it soak to get that
veneer off. But the guitar was so weak it wouldn't hold up."
So Henderson went to Albert Hash, an old-time musician and violin maker, who still lives
just a few miles from Rugby. Hash gave Henderson a hollow door, made of mahogany, that
someone had cut off and ruined. From pieces of that door Wayne built a serviceable flat-
top, and when he took the mahogany guitar back to Hash, the veteran builder was impressed
enough to order Wayne some rosewood for another guitar. "I made a nice one out of that and
I've been making them ever since, trying to make each one a little better," Henderson says.
Henderson's first efforts were crafted with only a pocket knife, a rasp, and a hand saw. He
cut the binding ledge with the knife. A piece of window glass became a scraper blade to
work the rosewood down to the desired thickness. Not knowing about marquetry, he
individually carved every tiny block for the back-seam strip.
"I didn't know any better. I thought that's the way it had to be done," he says. "If I had
sold one back then for $1,000.00, I would have made about 15 cents an hour."
But he began to borrow tools from Flash and to acquire tools of his own, and by the time he
graduated from high school Wayne had "a pretty good shop" set up in a farm building — which
remains his location. A steady stream of orders for instruments persuaded him to make
lutherie his livelihood.
Henderson makes two body styles, a 000-size guitar with either a 12-fret or a 14-fret neck,
and a dreadnought. Bodies are made of mahogany or rosewood, though he has built a few of
walnut. The tops are Sitka spruce, but he also made a few guitars with tops taken from a
cache of old Appalachian spruce.
"I've made one guitar out of it, and it sounded better than most of the others," he says.
"I think that wood might have had something to do with it. It was from a big tree, so it
was maybe 200 or 300 years old."
When he built the guitar that he plays now, however, he tried some new-growth Appalachian
spruce that was just a few years old. "It sat there for a winter and summer and seemed to
be seasoned real well," he explains. "It didn't warp or bend. So I used it, to see what it
would do, and it's been on the guitar over two years and it sounds great," he says.
Henderson has his wood sanded to working thickness on a drum sander at a
nearby furniture factory. Top thicknesses vary according to the flexibility of the wood,
but average about .100 of an inch. The backs and sides are sanded to about .090 of an inch.
Bracing for the tops follows the scalloped X-style of the old C. F. Martin herringbones.
He says he hasn't done too much experimenting with bracing. "I figure Martin has done most
of the experimenting, and I figure they sound as good as a guitar needs to sound,
especially the old ones," he says.
Sides are boiled for about 30 minutes and then are bent by hand over a length of pipe
heated by a torch. Henderson can bend a side in about 15 minutes.
Henderson makes his necks out of mahogany, ordering 4'x4' blanks and then cutting them out
on a band saw. He uses a router-like attachment on his Shopsmith [multi-purpose woodworking
machine] to shape the back of the peghead and to put the carved "diamond" in the back of
the neck. He uses a Surform rasp and a belt sander to shape the neck to the old-style "V"
profile, unless a customer prefers some other contour.
Wayne's neck reinforcement system utilizes a 3/16" steel rod that is screwed into a steel
block under the peghead. The rod is straight, but angles down so that at the heel it is set
deeper in the neck. Adjustment is made through the soundhole.
Rosewood and ebony are used for fret- boards and bridges. For about the past ten years
Henderson has drilled his bridge pin holes in a semicircle to prevent cracks, and he says
the method has yet to fail. Cracked bridges, he says, are about the most common problem on
instruments that are brought to him for repair. Nuts and saddles are made from bones he
picks up on hunting trips.
Henderson uses Titebond glue for most gluing operations. Typically, the binding he uses is
ivoroid, with an occasional guitar getting trimmed in white plastic. He packs a dark-brown
filler into the pores of the wood, following it with a sanding sealer and six to eight
coats of lacquer, until all the surfaces are sanded glass-smooth. Tuners on his guitars
generally are Grover machines, unless a customer prefers another type.
Custom options on Henderson's guitars include pearl inlay, as plain or ornate as a client
wants; sunburst tops; and fancy carved neck heels.
Wayne feels fortunate that he always has been able to get good wood for his instruments.
For the past few years he has obtained most of it from Gurian Guitars [Frets, May '79]. He
reserves his limited stock of Brazilian rosewood for special instruments.
Henderson devotes most of his working time to construction, leaving the bulk of the repair
work to his assistant, Gerald Anderson. He has never advertised his instruments. He meets
customers at fiddling conventions, or picks up clients through referrals by owners of his
guitars. He has made instruments for customers in Texas, Montana, Minnesota, Florida, and
Canada, and he recently completed a guitar for singer/guitarist Peter Rowan.
Henderson says a larger shop would be the biggest help in clearing his current backlog of
two dozen orders. "A lot of my tools are set up to do repair work," he says. "If I was just
going to turn out instruments, I could rig up a better place to do it. That would speed me
up more than anything else." But he would "rather make a few good ones slower than turn out
sorry ones faster."
He makes clamps and jigs on his Shops-mith. Wayne's brother Max, who is a machinist, helped
equip the shop with a belt sander, a drill press, a metal jig for sawing slots in
fretboards, and a nifty pan-tograph carver for shaping mandolin tops and backs.
"It takes about 20 minutes to carve a top or a back," he says. "It used to take me all day
to carve one with a sanding disc on the Shopsmith." Final structural tuning and shaping of
the mandolin plates are done by hand. Most of his mandolins have F-style bodies, with the
characteristic Florentine scroll.
Henderson also is well known for his repair work. His credits include having installed a
truss rod in the Martin C-3 arch- top of flatpicking ace Steve Kaufman, and he worked
intermittently for a few years as a repairman for Nashville vintage instrument dealer
George Gruhn, back when Gruhn's operation was named GTR.
"I'd go down and work for three weeks to a month and then come back home," he says. "I kept
my shop going up here. George would always have real nice instruments to work on."
Henderson met Randy Wood — "probably my favorite repairman of anybody" — while working for
Gruhn, and learned some techniques from him.
Henderson also plays what he makes. He has won more than 60 guitar contests with a three-
finger picking technique that could pass for flatpicking in a blindfold test. He and his
wife, Carol, have been performing together since they were married about seven years ago.
Henderson plays some banjo and mandolin (with fingerpicks) in addition to guitar, and Carol
sings, plays some lead guitar, and fiddles. She builds fiddles, and repairs fiddles that
are brought to the shop.
The Hendersons perform at fiddling conventions and at some clubs. For the past few years,
the Department of the Interior has sent them to the Border Folk Festival in El Paso, Texas,
in conjunction with Henderson's travels for the Smithsonian Institute — which came about
through a craft guild in Galax that became connected with the Smithsonian. The Hendersons
also performed this year in the National Folk Festival at Wolftrap, Virginia, near
Washington, D.C.
As a luthier, Henderson claims there are no "big secrets" in what he does. "The main thing
about doing good work," he says, "is patience, and taking time to do it right."
