Despite Wayne’s efforts, she showed little interest in the family business, preferring law school to a woodshop. But her interest was piqued when she saw on Ebay how much money one of her father’s handcrafted guitars was bringing in. She needed money for school so she asked her dad whether he could make a guitar for her that she could sell.
He said no.
But he did make her a counteroffer. He would help her build one.
She agreed and in the process of making the instrument discovered how much she enjoyed creating the guitar and working with her father. Jayne has now made more than 100 instruments and has developed a preference building ukuleles that are a better fit for her smaller hands.
“I never made a guitar that I didn’t drop,” she quipped during a workshop on guitar anatomy at MerleFest.
“Wayne, whose own guitar count stands at about 800, cracked that the uke is just a guitar that “hasn’t quite ripened.” He explained that the instruments that number in the even hundreds are special and are ones he tends to keep. For instance the one he was playing at the workshop was No. 500 and No. 800 was made for his granddaughter. (Eric Clapton has a Henderson guitar, but Wayne didn’t mention what number it was.)
Born to a farm family, Wayne wanted to make guitars since he was about six years old. He said he made his first one from a cardboard box when he was just seven or eight and admitted that his initial attempts were not encouraging. He said he couldn’t figure out how to bend the sides and how to glue everything together so it wouldn’t fall apart.
“The fact is, 50 years ago there weren’t any computers or books to tell you how to do it,” he said.
His dad suggested he talk to Albert, a neighbor who had once made fiddles. Albert taught the youngster how to bend wood over a pipe that had been heated in an oven. He gave Wayne some sanding tips and materials to use and was so impressed by the guitar the boy made that he regretted not giving him better wood to work with.
Wayne said it took him about a year to make that first guitar, but he soon got better at it. By No. 7 he had produced a fine instrument that caught the attention of a friend of a moon
shiner he knew. Wayne was a little leery of dealing with a guy who would hang out with an outlaw so when the man asked to buy the guitar the builder set a price of $500, an amount he figured would be high enough to scare him off. It was when the man later produced the cash that Wayne realized he might be able to make a living with his craftsmanship.
Repairing guitars was also a part of the business and gave him insight into how Gibson and Martin guitars were built. His study of their structures helped him perfect his own designs.
Early on his tools included a pocketknife and a piece of broken glass that he used to laboriously plane down the wood to the proper thickness. He was later able to get a friend who worked in a furniture factory to have the wood put through an industrial sander. That friend now works in his shop.
At the workshop, Wayne, who is also an accomplished and award-winning picker, explained the most important part of the guitar is the soundboard, which he makes out of Appalachian spruce. He and Jayne demonstrated how shaving the braces on the inside to the right thickness and configuration determines the tone. Wayne compared it to an audio speaker. By thumping the wood he can tell when the sound is right. Jayne suggested the innovation of using an electronic tuner to find the perfect resonance.
Being a guitarist, I found learning what makes a guitar sing fascinating. This workshop also taught me, however, that with Jayne in the business, the Henderson fine instrument building tradition is in good, if somewhat smaller, hands.