Wayne C. Henderson is an American guitar maker who specializes in the crafting of handmade, custom acoustic guitars. He also occasionally makes other stringed instruments, such as mandolins, banjos, and fiddles.
Wayne C. Henderson is an American guitar maker who specializes in the crafting of handmade, custom acoustic guitars. He also occasionally makes other stringed instruments, such as mandolins, banjos, and fiddles.
Henderson was born May 3, 1947, in Grayson County, Virginia, [1] where he still resides today. He is a full-time instrument builder and musician, specializing in building guitars, mandolins, and plays with a unique finger-picking style. Though he has lived in Grayson County, Virginia, all of his life, Henderson has played countless performances in the southeast and in many foreign countries as well. He has been a member of several bands, and influenced many regional musicians, through both his music and craft. He developed a unique style of using a thumbpick and fingerpicks, like his father played on banjo, making his playing sound like flatpicking similar to that of Doc Watson, one of Henderson's musical influences.
Henderson's guitars are inspired by the great pre-World War II guitars of C.F. Martin & Company, and are hand-built in limited quantities; by October 2012, over five hundred Henderson guitars had been constructed. As of the year 2022, Henderson has built nearly nine hundred acoustic guitars, over one hundred mandolins, and has also built several banjos to add to his name. Henderson was originally exposed to the art of luthiery by a local of Grayson County, Albert Hash. Hash was a violin builder and repairer who gave inspiration to Henderson and helped him learn about different types of wood and how to work with wood.
Henderson has been an acoustic instrument maker and repairer for nearly 50 years. However, this has not been his main source of income through the years. He briefly worked as a part time repairman at Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, Tennessee. Henderson also worked for thirty some odd years as a rural mail carrier, delivering mail all throughout southwest Virginia. During his time as a mail carrier, he would build instruments in the time that he was not delivering mail. In that time he would build five to ten instruments per year. Now that he is retired, he builds somewhere between twenty and thirty instruments per year. Henderson has built quite the waiting list for one of his instruments. People often have to wait up to a decade until the completion of an instrument. He usually sells his guitars in the $3000 to $5000 range, and on the open market they can go for $20,000 to $30,000, which is one of the reasons why he has acquired such a waiting list.
Henderson has built guitars for many notable musicians such as Tommy Emmanuel, Doc Watson, Peter Rowan, Gillian Welch, [2] Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Eric Clapton, and many others.
The book Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument (2005) outlined the process by which Henderson built a guitar for Eric Clapton. [3] In 2008 he was the subject of an Appalshop documentary, From Wood to Singing Guitar.
As well as being a world renowned instrument maker, he has also become well known for his guitar playing ability. Henderson is also a fingerstyle guitar player, and was influenced by his older cousin Estil C. Ball. [4] He was featured as part of the "Masters of the Steel String Guitar" tour and has traveled internationally with the United States Information Agency. He also performed at Carnegie Hall and the Smithsonian Institution and for "America's Reunion" during the 1992 presidential inauguration.
He has won over 300 ribbons playing in competitions at fiddlers conventions.
In a 1995 White House ceremony, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship [1] in recognition of his extraordinary instrument-making.
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, in modern forms usually made of plastic, originally of animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashioned by African Americans and had African antecedents. In the 19th century, interest in the instrument was spread across the United States and United Kingdom by traveling shows of the 19th century minstrel show fad, followed by mass-production and mail-order sales, including instruction method books. The inexpensive or home-made banjo remained part of rural folk culture, but 5-string and 4-string banjos also became popular for home parlor music entertainment, college music clubs, and early 20th century jazz bands. By the early 21st century, the banjo was most frequently associated with folk, bluegrass and country music, but was also used in some rock, pop and even hip-hop music. Among rock bands, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead have used the five-string banjo in some of their songs. Some famous pickers of the banjo are Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs.
A mandolin is a stringed musical instrument in the lute family and is generally plucked with a pick. It most commonly has four courses of doubled strings tuned in unison, thus giving a total of eight strings. A variety of string types are used, with steel strings being the most common and usually the least expensive. The courses are typically tuned in an interval of perfect fifths, with the same tuning as a violin. Also, like the violin, it is the soprano member of a family that includes the mandola, octave mandolin, mandocello and mandobass.
C.F. Martin & Company is an American guitar manufacturer established in 1833 by Christian Frederick Martin. It is highly respected for its acoustic guitars and is a leading manufacturer of flat top guitars. The company has also made mandolins and tiples, as well as several models of electric guitars and electric basses, although none of these other instruments are still in production.
Old-time music is a genre of North American folk music. It developed along with various North American folk dances, such as square dancing, clogging, and buck dancing. It is played on acoustic instruments, generally centering on a combination of fiddle and plucked string instruments, most often the banjo, guitar, and mandolin. Together, they form an ensemble called the string band, which has historically been the most common configuration to play old-time music. The genre is considered a precursor to modern country music.
The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings, originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.
An archtop guitar is a hollow acoustic or semi-acoustic guitar with a full body and a distinctive arched top, whose sound is particularly popular with jazz, blues, and rockabilly players.
Dean Guitars, commonly referred to simply as Dean, is an American importer and maker of stringed instruments and musical products with its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
The Vega Company was a musical instrument manufacturer that started operations in Boston, Massachusetts in 1881. The company began under Swedish-born Julius Nelson, his brother Carl, and a group of associates that included John Pahn and John Swenson. The founders had previously worked for a guitar shop run by Pehr Anderberg that made instruments for John C. Haynes, another Boston musical instrument company. Nelson had served as foreman of guitar and mandolin manufacturing at Anderberg's shop. Subsequently, Julius and Carl Nelson bought out the other founding associates and established the Vega company.
The Irish bouzouki is an adaptation of the Greek bouzouki. The newer Greek tetrachordo bouzouki was introduced into Irish traditional music in the mid-1960s by Johnny Moynihan of the folk group Sweeney's Men, who retuned it from its traditional Greek tuning C³F³A³D⁴ to G²D³A³D⁴, a tuning he had pioneered previously on the mandolin. Alec Finn, first in the Cana Band and subsequently in De Dannan, introduced the first Greek trichordo (3 course) bouzouki into Irish music.
The tenor guitar or four-string guitar is a slightly smaller, four-string relative of the steel-string acoustic guitar or electric guitar. The instrument was initially developed in its acoustic form by Gibson and C.F. Martin so that players of the four-string tenor banjo could double on guitar.
The electric mandolin is an instrument tuned and played as the mandolin and amplified in similar fashion to an electric guitar. As with electric guitars, electric mandolins take many forms. Most common is a carved-top eight-string instrument fitted with an electric pickup in similar fashion to many archtop semi-acoustic guitars. Solid body mandolins are common in 4-, 5-, and 8-string forms. Acoustic electric mandolins also exist in many forms.
A resonator guitar or resophonic guitar is an acoustic guitar that produces sound by conducting string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones (resonators), instead of to the guitar's sounding board (top). Resonator guitars were originally designed to be louder than regular acoustic guitars, which were overwhelmed by horns and percussion instruments in dance orchestras. They became prized for their distinctive tone, and found life with bluegrass music and the blues well after electric amplification solved the problem of inadequate volume.
A mandolin orchestra is an orchestra consisting primarily of instruments from the mandolin family of instruments, such as the mandolin, mandola, mandocello and mandobass or mandolone. Some mandolin orchestras use guitars and double-basses instead of, or as well as, the lower mandolin-family instruments.
Michael DeTemple is an American musician and luthier known for his handmade solid-body guitars. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, DeTemple began repairing and maintaining a wide range of stringed instruments at the age of thirteen. Early on, he became acquainted with renowned guitarist Ernie Ball, who retained his services by paying with old guitars.
Elderly Instruments is a musical instrument retailer in Lansing, Michigan, United States, with a reputation as a "megastore", a repair shop and a locus for folk music including bluegrass and "twang". Specializing in fretted instruments, including acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, mandolins, and ukuleles, Elderly maintains a selection of odd or rare instruments. Elderly is known as a premier repair shop for fretted instruments, as one of the larger vintage instrument dealers in the United States, and as a major dealer of Martin guitars in particular.
Casa Del Vecchio Ltda. is a traditional guitarmaking company headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil. Since its foundation by Angelo Del Vecchio in 1902, it has produced a wide range of acoustic stringed instruments. In the 1930s, Del Vecchio began producing resonator guitars, resulting in their most famous model: the Dinâmico,.
Levin was a Swedish manufacturer of musical instruments founded by Herman Carlson Levin. Active from 1900 to 1978, the company produced over half a million instruments, mostly guitars, but also mandolins, banjos and lutes, making Levin the largest instrument manufacturer in Scandinavia for many years. Levin is best known for originating Goya acoustic guitars.
Nigel Gavin is a New Zealand based musician and composer, best known as a guitar player. In addition to being a highly regarded solo artist and session musician, Nigel has been a member of bands such as popular New Zealand jazz quartett The Nairobi Trio, Robert Fripp's The League of Crafty Guitarists, klezmer "Jews Brothers", and Jonathan Besser's Bravura, as well as collaborator with artists such as folk singers Luke Hurley, Wayne Gillespie and Lorina Harding, Maori soul diva Whirimako Black, multi-instrumentalist Tom Ludvigson, jazz singer Caitlin Smith and harmonica maestro Brendan Power. He has a vast musical vocabulary which ranges from acoustic blues and folk to jazz, rock, fusion, surf pop, complex ambient grooves and various world music genres, in particular klezmer. Nigel's original jazz compositions cross boundaries of genre and combine musical traditions. He has toured extensively and performed at numerous music and art festivals in New Zealand, America, Australia and Europe. An active mentor to young artists, Nigel founded and mentored the New Zealand guitar collective concept bands Gitbox and Gitbox Rebellion. As a constant innovator, he is a regular contributor to the Auckland experimental music salon Vitamin S and has given multimedia performances with photographer Ralph Talmont's photographs.
Collings Guitars is an Austin, Texas–based stringed instrument manufacturer. The company was founded in 1973 by BillCollings. In addition to acoustic guitars, Collings Guitars manufactures electric guitars, archtop guitars, mandolins and ukuleles.
D'Angelico Guitars of America is an American musical instrument manufacturer based in Manhattan, New York. The brand was initially founded by master luthier John D'Angelico in 1932, in Manhattan's Little Italy. In 1999, Steve Pisani, John Ferolito Jr., and Brenden Cohen purchased the D'Angelico Guitars trademark. Cohen serves as the brand's president and CEO. Original D'Angelico guitars are collector's items and have been used by musicians including Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Drake Bell, Bucky Pizzarelli, Chet Atkins, and Chuck Wayne. The D'Angelico Mel Bay New Yorker model was featured on the cover of the Mel Bay Publications' guitar method books for decades.