Untitled Document

MIKE HENDERSON
AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

Mike Henderson was born in Independence, Missouri, just outside Kansas City. He grew up in a household humming with music, and he's grateful to his mother for spinning the records of everyone from bluesman John Lee Hooker to big band leader Tommy Dorsey as she did her housework. Listening to Top 40 radio in the 60s opened Mike's ears, too. "That was the old Top 40," says Mike, "there was Slim Harpo, Ray Price, Ray Charles, and The Beatles and everybody was on one station. That's what you heard. So I grew up hearing a really wide variety of stuff."

Beginning with the harmonica at the age of five and graduating to guitar at around the age of twelve or thirteen, Henderson drove head-first into music. During his years at high school he played rock & roll in garage bands but rock music soon wore thin for the teenage musician and that's when he discovered country music. Mike put away his electric guitar and got hold of a flat-top acoustic while listening more and more to folk and bluegrass. Upon moving to Columbia, Missouri, to attend the University of Missouri, he quickly fell-in with the local bluegrass and old-time country music crowd and found himself playing fiddle and mandolin for seven years in a succession of bluegrass bands. He also soaked-up old-time fiddle music wherever he could. "I'd play in fiddle contests," recalls Mike, "and back up the old guys, too. I learned a lot from them."

After his bluegrass gigs ran their course, for a change of pace, Henderson joined a blues band, the Bel Airs, that toured the Midwest for five years. The experience helped him develop his distinctive guitar style which he aptly describes as "half Bill Monroe and half Muddy Waters." Mike's left hand had become pretty strong after playing mandolin for so many years, he had the string action set quite high because as he says "you gotta crank that action up on a mandolin to get it to be loud, to sound out." So, anytime he picked up an ordinary electric guitar Mike found himself pushing the strings right across the fret-board, if they didn't break first! At the time Mike had an old Silvetone guitar and he began to use very heavy guage strings and kept the action high, just like on his mandolin. It was this that made Mike's guitar playing sound different to everyone else.

Though the gigs in and around Missouri were good, Mike eventually felt a need to reach a wider audience and take his love of country music to another level. His wife agreed: Nashville was the place. When the Hendersons arrived in Nashville in 1985 they knew no-one. He and his wife drove down one weekend, rented a house, turned around and drove back. The next time they drove into in Nashville Mike was behind the wheel of a U-Haul truck with all their possessions stacked in the back. It took Mike around a year to break into the local music scene, but when he did he found the right people, joining a band called The Roosters along with Wally Wilson, Kevin Welch, Gary Nicholson, Harry Stinson and bassist Glenn Worf. This was the first time Mike had mixed with writers and from The Roosters, and a spin-off band called The Snakes - still fondly remembered in Nashville for their blistering Monday night roots rock shows at the Bluebird Café and a 1989 album on Curb Records - Henderson built a solid reputation as a distinctive singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist capable of holding forth on electric slide guitar, harmonica, National/Dobro, mandolin or fiddle.

It wasn't long before offers came pouring in for studio work. Emmylou Harris called Mike in for her Bluebird album and that was followed by John Hiatt's Stolen Moments, Joy Lynn White's Between Midnight and Hindsight, and Kelly Willis' self-titled album. Mike has also worked with other major artists such as Hank Williams Jnr, Suzy Bogguss, Guy Clark and Delbert McClinton. Mike's songs have been recorded by a number of acts including Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, Highway 101, Neal McCoy, Holly Dunn and Trisha Yearwood. Mike's Powerful Stuff was covered by the Fabulous Thunderbirds for the 1988 multi-million selling soundtrack of the film Cocktail. With these successes came a deal from RCA which led to the 1994 release of Mike's Country Music Made me Do It. Sadly, critical acclaim did not produce the kind of country radio air play the album deserved leaving Mike and RCA to part company. Mike's latest album, The Edge of Night, has recently been released on the Dead Reckoning label and acts as a showcase for every facet of Henderson's talent.

Mike can still be found playing at the Bluebird Café in Nashville as a member of The BlueBloods along with Glenn Worf, John Jarvis and John Gardner. The band have two albums to their credit, their debut CD First Blood and Thicker Than Water, and among the guitar players who have turned up at the Bluebird for some of the most in your face blues you are likely to hear anywhere is Mark Knopfler. Mark remembers his first time seeing the band, "I was in my kind of heaven. Here were some men I wanted to play music with…Henderson sings and plays the way a hundred blues bands can't and don't." Not surprising then, that Mark called upon Mike's services for the recording of the Sailing To Philadelphia album and asked him to join him for the 2001 STP tour. Mike's harmonica playing will be featured in a track from Knopfler's forth-coming third solo album, The Ragpicker's Dream.

http://www.mikehenderson.com