Sheri Wren Haymore

WAYNE CREED

Before there can be a music festival, there must be music, right? I spoke with local guitar maker and Bluegrass musician Wayne Creed to learn about the instruments and musical heritage of Surry County. When my husband and I arrived for the interview, Mr. Creed brought out a favorite of the instruments he had made for us to see. What an exquisite work of art! He had constructed this particular guitar exactly like the old Martin D-45 guitars with eye-catching Brazilian Rosewood back and sides. So that I would understand what a rare instrument he held in his hands, he emphasized that Martin stopped using Brazilian rosewood in the late 1960s because the trees were nearing extinction. Rosewood, which has a greater hardness than even rock maple, is prized for its highly resonant acoustic qualities, and the book-matched rosewood on Mr. Creed’s guitar is uniquely beautiful. It features a lovely Adirondack spruce front, mother of pearl inlays, and goldplated tuners. The headstock spells out “R W CREED” instead of “Martin.” Mr. Creed commented, “I made it such that I can’t sell it,” because of the rare rosewood and all the time and detail that went into making it. Ever since playing a rosewood Martin 1966 D-45 in 1969 in a guitar shop near Hillsville, Mr. Creed has wanted this iconic model. “That was the best-playing guitar I ever held in my hands,” he said, but it wasn’t for sale. He’s kept the serial number of that instrument in his billfold all these years, just in case he might run across it again. In 2011, while touring the Martin plant in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, at the company’s invitation, Mr. Creed saw one of those prized guitars, valued then at $60,000. Martin still offers a model D-45, with Mahogany back and sides, for around $9500. Mr. Creed crafted his first guitar around 1975. Before that, he had made a mandolin like a Gibson F-5 (best known as Bill Monroe’s mandolin of choice), sanding it to perfection by hand. Besides guitars, he’s produced three mandolins and four bass fiddles. “All the training I got, I learned for myself,” he said. Mr. Creed told me that he first started working on bass fiddles when someone brought him a 1945 Kay upright bass that had been in a car wreck and had “flown apart” into seven pieces. Repairing that bass is also how he started playing the bass. That classic instrument now belongs to a local family whose daughters are learning to play it. I wanted to hear more about the process of creating a guitar. The sides and back, Mr. Creed told me, must be sanded to one-tenth of an inch, and the front even thinner. He uses light bulbs and a steam box to get the wood hot and damp, then bends it into a mold the shape of the sides. Most luthiers use quarter-sawn Sitka Spruce, known for great sound quality, to make the fronts; the braces have a lot to do with the sound, as well. Some makers tune the top by sanding and tapping on the wood until they get the sound they desire. “I’m just an old farmer,” Wayne Creed chuckled, “I don’t do that.” I’d say by the perfection of the guitar he showed me and his musical legacy, Mr. Creed knows what he’s doing when it comes to acoustics. He commented that musicians can tell a lot about a guitar from its tone. In fact, when Mac Wiseman (of Flatt and Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Boys fame) brought some friends by to make music with Wayne, one of the women in the group played the second guitar Mr. Creed had made. Without being told that the instrument was nearly forty years old, she remarked that it had “aged well.” Mr. Creed recounted the days when he played alongside legendary fiddlers Tommy Jarrell and Benton Flippen. He began playing with Benton Flippen around age twelve. With a sly smile, he said that his favorite memories were playing with Tommy Jarrell when famous musicians Kenny Baker and Bill Monroe came to town. From those jam sessions in the early 1970s, the Country Boys Bluegrass band was formed by Creed and his nephew Donald Clifton. The band is still going strong, with Clifton the only original member. Back in his Country Boys days, while traveling all over North Carolina and surrounding states, Mr. Creed was still farming and working at Westinghouse. Although he declared those years were “rough, working and trying to go make music,” he recalled the

good times camping when his children “would come along.” During those years, the group would play for square dances at the Fairview, Virginia, Ruritan Club, especially during the winter months. Creed said the folks “up that mountain” could sure dance; they’d “come in the front door dancing and dance out the back” when it was over. So many dancers would come that they’d form two rings of dancers, one inside the other, dancing so hard that he could watch the floor bounce. Playing the bass fiddle for four hours straight was tiring, he said, but the dancers would “holler” if they tried to take a break. The Country Boys also played for the flatfoot dancers competing at the Galax Fiddlers Convention. Wayne turned down my request that he play his guitar for me, saying that his hands don’t work quite like they used to. A couple of years ago, at the Mt. Airy Bluegrass and Old-Time Fiddlers Convention, he played for the last time when some folks begged him to play for them. Now eighty-seven years of age, he had thought he wasn’t going to make another guitar, but with a twinkle in his eye, he began telling about the walnut boards he had from a blown-over tree. He’s pulled a slice from the middle of the log where “the grain stood straight up,” and he believes he’ll make an all-walnut guitar, out of curiosity to see how it will look and sound. Now that it’s spring and music festivals abound, go and enjoy the music. No matter the genre, if you’ll pull up a seat beside an oldtimer and ask to hear their story, you can be assured you’ll learn some fascinating things about the music.

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