Allen St. John's soulful new book, "Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument," is about rock/blues guru Eric Clapton's 10-year wait for one of Henderson's much-prized acoustic guitars.
Well, actually it's not about that at all.
It's about the picky, procrastinating Virginia mountain man who finally gets around to making it.
The story starts in 1994, in a New York City recording studio, when Clapton starts noodling on a stray guitar. He loves the flat fingerboard. He wants one for his personal horde.
And so it is that Clapton's order for a Wayne Henderson guitar makes its way to Rugby, Va., population 7. The bearded, baseball-cap-wearing Henderson, whom St. John calls a "Stradivari in glue-stained blue jeans," promptly pigeonholes the order.
It's not that Henderson is lazy. He puts in 15-hour days in his little shop in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And when he's not making guitars, he's playing guitar. Henderson is one of the country's best pickers of old-time music, what the rest of us ignorantly call bluegrass.
Over the past 30 years, Henderson has built just 300 guitars. He takes the order and then waits until he finds just the right pieces of wood. Then he waits until the mood strikes him to turn that wood into the guitar he knows his customer wants.
"Wayne Henderson doesn't build guitars so much as bestow them," St. John writes.
Henderson is characteristically ambivalent toward the Clapton guitar. He doesn't know Clapton's music, not even the legendary "Layla." "I think Wayne secretly took a bit of perverse pride in keeping a famous guitar player waiting," St. John observes, "while providing magnificent instruments for friends like Gabby who barely played at all."
Henderson's procrastination apparently wore off on St. John during the writing of his book. Just as the Wall Street Journal columnist gets this very good story going, he starts meandering like a mountain stream. He goes on at length about his own guitars and lots of other interesting but unnecessary guitar-related things. Still, navigating all those twists and turns is worth it when he finally arrives at describing Henderson's artistry: "And as he whittled on the top, Wayne played out the great balancing act of guitar-building. Leave a few grams too much on the braces and the guitar will sound dull and lifeless. Too little and it'll be boomy and tubby."
Henderson's humor is modest and appealing. "You start with a pile of good wood," he says. "Some nice Brazilian rosewood. Some good Appalachian spruce. And then you get yourself a sharp whittling knife and you cut away anything that doesn't look like a guitar."
Musicians will love this book. They'll surely find in it the same simple truths and bare-boned beauty that writers found in E. Annie Proulx's novel, "The Shipping News."
But don't worry if you can't tell the difference between a 1939 Martin 0000-42 and a 1949 D-28. Chances are you'll love it, too. Henderson's lifelong affliction with the slows is a perfect antidote for our era of hyperdrive.
"Every note seems to explode out of the sound hole," St. Johns writes of Henderson's handmade guitars, "with a volume that's almost shocking. Yet each note is still sweet and smooth. In guitar parlance, it's a cannon."
St. John's homage to Henderson is something of a cannon, too.
