November 3, 2005
The Genius and Tradition Behind a Great Guitar Posted by Allen Barra at 09:00 AM EST Wayne Henderson lives and works in Rugby, Virginia, a community in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a population of seven. (He jokes that he and his fellow residents have to take turns being “the mayor, the preacher, and the town drunk.”) He’s an American original, perhaps the finest living guitar maker in the world, an artist equally at home at Carnegie Hall or entertaining rescue-squad workers at a potluck dinner. In a wonderful new book, Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument (Free Press, $25), Allen St. John articulates Henderson’s vision, leading us through the steps by which a few strips of wood and a half dozen steel strings become the means for transforming inspiration into sound. Ostensibly the story of how Henderson (winner of the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship) built a guitar for the British rock legend Eric Clapton—after keeping him waiting for 10 years—Clapton’s Guitar is only a guitar book in the sense that The Orchid Thief is a only book about gardening. St. John makes the case for the transformative power of certain objects and the not-so-quaint notion of craftsmanship. The book is as much the story of a man as of an instrument, and of the characters who stop by just to watch. Henderson’s shop is perched, both literally and figuratively, on the outskirts of the twentieth century, in a place that, give or take a few power tools, hasn’t changed much since his mother was born almost a hundred years ago. Henderson boils the instrument’s thin rosewood sides over a hot plate to get them to bend, and he finds rare and valuable tonewood in the most unlikely places; one instrument was built from a piece of Brazilian rosewood that was once a table in Truman Capote’s yacht. St. John writes likes Henderson’s guitars play, clear and resonant. And with harmony, too, bringing in another master guitar builder, Massachusetts-based T. J. Thompson, to occasionally offer alternative methods of attaining guitar-craft perfection. Clapton’s Guitar centers on a poignant irony: Henderson is a practical businessman quietly trying to stem the course of modern commerce. For 200 years American capitalism has been about figuring out ways to take handmade goods and mass-produce them quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. Every day when he pulls on his baseball cap and picks up a bottle of Titebond, Henderson resists the pull of time. The golden-age instruments that he replicates were built on an assembly line at the Martin guitar company factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, during the depths of the Great Depression. The only way to recreate that magic is with one man working alone in a tiny shop, taking a pile of wood and a sharp whittling knife, and “cutting away everything that doesn’t look like a guitar.” When Henderson fills in a tiny gap hidden in the bowels of a guitar with a sliver of mahogany no thicker than a sheet of looseleaf paper, a detail that the owner of the guitar will never see, it’s a small triumph over the culture of good enough. St. John’s attention to his own craft is worthy of his subject. He picks up on some delightful details, such as Henderson’s penchant for writing semi-obscene messages inside his heirloom guitars. If the instrument is treated with lifelong care, no one will ever see his rude notes. We can be thankful that Eric Clapton, and not Pete Townshend, was the one who commissioned Wayne Henderson.
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