A while back Modern Guitars conducted an interview with bluegrass guitarist and luthier Wayne Henderson. The interview was published at the end of September, but we somehow missed it in our IBMA rush.

It is an extensive interview covering Wayne’s unique picking style, his background and introduction to the music, his love for acoustic guitar, his history as a luthier, and the current state of his business.

Included are a handful of photos of Wayne and various instruments he has constructed.

For those interested in acoustic guitar, or luthiery in general, you’ll want to take the time to read this interview.

Last Friday, June 13, the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame held a ceremony inducting its charter members. The ceremony took place at the Walker Center on the campus of Wilkes Community College, the home of Merlefest.

The Hall of Fame is located on the second floor of the Wilkes Heritage Museum, housed in a turn of the century (1902) historical courthouse. The exhibit actually opened on May 29, featuring instruments, biographies, and historical recordings. Intending to include both famous musicians, as well as those who have worked behind the scenes to make the music possible, from a geographic area ranging from northern Georgia into northern Virginia, the Hall of Fame inducted the following persons.

• Doc Watson
• Dolly Parton
• Wayne Henderson
• David Johnson (a studio musician and performer from Wilkes County)
• Earl Scruggs

Deceased inductees:

• The Carter Family
• Ralph Epperson (the founder of radio station WPAQ in Mount Airy)
• Tommy Jarrell (an influential banjo player and fiddler from Surry County)
• Folklorist Ralph Rinzler of the Smithsonian Institution
• Sam Love Queen Sr. (known as the Square Dance King of Western North Carolina)

You can see photos and short bios of each inductee at this link.

Art Menius, a longtime fixture at MerleFest and now director of Appalshop, a nonprofit group in Whitesburg, Ky., that documents and celebrates the culture of Appalachia, will be an honorary inductee. He did much of the preliminary work for the hall of fame.

Art is an active member of the online bluegrass community and we congratulate him on this well deserved honor.

As a Virginia native, I hold a longstanding appreciation for the commonwealth and its art, culture, people and natural beauty. But I’ll not be surprised or disappointed if people entering this new contest prefer as their prize a new Wayne Henderson guitar over a trip for two to my beloved home state.

The contest to promote The Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, is sponsored by Virginia.org, the home of the state’s official tourism office online. Grand Prize winners will receive a new Henderson Crooked Road series guitar, and four First Prize winners get an all expenses paid trip to one of four Virginia tourist destinations.

Second prize is a new handcrafted guitar from Anderson-Strickland.

Entries can be submitted online until June 29, 2008 and with your entry, you’ll be able to download a free copy of the song Down On The Crooked Road, the first single from the new CD, RIPE by The Dixie Bee-Liners.

The Ola Belle Reed Homecoming Festival is sponsoring the raffle of a Wayne Henderson D-18 guitar to raise funds to further and preserve the music of their namesake.

Ola Belle Reed was a singer, songwriter and banjo player who performed with her family as the North Carolina Ridge Runners starting in the 1950s. She passed away in 2002, and the festival was established to help keep her music alive.

As they put it on their site:

The Festival will feature the music of Ola Belle’s husband and sons, musicians who played with her over the years, newer groups that are carrying on her tradition, and local talent. It will also celebrate the life and philosophy of a woman who spent a lifetime “tearing down the fences that fence us all in.”

Wayne Henderson’s guitars are made by hand in his small shop, with waiting lists of several years the norm. He was the subject of a book published in 2005 called Clapton’s Guitar, by Allen St. John, which chronicles the building of a custom Henderson guitar for the rock legend.

You can find out more about the raffle, and purchase tickets online, on the Ola Belle Reed festival web site.

Sam Bush will be a guest on the November 25th edition of A Prairie Home Companion on National Public Radio. The show will be broadcast live from Cincinnati, OH, and will also include performances by noted guitarist/luthier Wayne Henderson and steel guitarist Buddy Emmons.

The show is carried on 580 public radio affiliate stations, on the Armed Forces Network, and on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Channel 134. Broadcast times vary from one affiliate to another, with many carrying the live feed on Saturday afternoons, and others running it instead early on Sunday afternoon.

The show will also be webcast live (5:00 - 7:00 p.m. CST), and can be accessed using Windows Media Player on the Prairie Home Companion web site. Past shows are archived on the PHC web site, with audio files usually available by the Monday morning following a weekend broadcast.