Forget the Morning Crew and the Long Distance Dedications: Radio’s Original Hit Format Lives On With the Martha Bassett Show
Conversations With Martha Bassett and Guest Artist Wayne Henderson From the Martha Bassett Show’s 100th Episode
April was packed with travel and music, and here is the first of many conversations to share as we go through spring and early summer. Still to come: my interviews from MerleFest, with Woody Platt and Buddy Melton, and Tami Neilson. After that, there are a number of artists I am looking forward to talking with at this week’s Albino Skunk Music Festival in Greer, SC.
Below is the written transcript of the script and interviews for this Southern Songs and Stories podcast episode. Follow the series wherever you find podcasts as well as on the Southern Songs and Stories website.
[Wayne Henderson and Friends “Sweet Georgia Brown” from The Martha Bassett Show, continuing as bed]
It has been a century since live radio broadcasts like the National Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago, and the Grand Ole Opry on WSM in Nashville began airing variety shows of performances of roots music in 1924 and 1925 respectively. These were radio’s first hit shows, and the idea took root all around the country. Longtime North Carolinians may have heard of the Crazy Barn Dance on WBT in Charlotte and WPTF in Raleigh in the 1930s, for example. These early variety shows featured music ranging from what we call country or Americana music today but was then termed hillbilly music, to gospel, and folk music, as well as comedy skits in the mix. Radio itself was brand new, having been a curiosity before the Great War, but shuttered entirely in the U.S. as a public offering during the years of the world conflict, only to reemerge as a medium that would become ubiquitous in the 1920s. Over the decades, most of the truly live broadcasts fell by the wayside. Although the Opry is still going strong, another variation of music variety shows came on the scene with shows like A Prairie Home Companion, e-Town and Mountain Stage, which crossed over into being radio shows that were adapted from their original live performances and edited for length and content.
The live, as well as the live-to-tape format, shows a symbiotic relationship between live performances and the radio, and more recent media, like podcasts. The event itself is its own draw, but broadcast that and your ceiling is exponentially higher -- now you have an even larger arena to work with, and the broadcast helps turn any number of casual listeners into fans and potential live audience members.
When the old art deco movie theater in Elkin, NC changed hands in 2013, its new owners were aware of this, and approached Martha Bassett and her partner Pat Lawrence about the possibility of producing a live series there; a couple years later, The Martha Bassett Show made its debut. WFDD in Winston-Salem NC originates the weekly show, which is also syndicated to other public radio stations especially, and which my station WNCW picked up for broadcast in early 2025.
The Martha Bassett Show put on its 100th episode in April of this year, which seemed like the perfect time to trek up to the northwestern foothills of NC and take it all in. The show featured guests Liz Longley, Hank Pattie & the Current, and a music artist who happens to have built many guitars for Grand Ole Opry members among other stars, Wayne Henderson. Wayne’s version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” from his set on The Martha Bassett Show is playing now. I spoke with both Martha Bassett and Wayne Henderson while there, where we talked with Martha about the extraordinary nature of the show with collaboration amongst its guests a built-in feature, the ever-changing and now perhaps especially challenging landscape for the arts, and with Wayne about his world famous instruments as well as memories of Doc Watson, and current Grand Ole Opry member and client Marty Stuart. I am Joe Kendrick, welcoming you to stick around for all of that and a lot more on this episode of Southern Songs and Stories.
[SSaS theme song with VO by Joe K]
00:00:51 Joe Kendrick
Martha Bassett on WNCW and Southern songs and stories. So great to be here in downtown Elkin, NC, for your 100th episode of the Martha Bassett Show.
00:01:01 Martha Bassett
Thank you so much for being here with us.
00:01:02 Joe Kendrick
It's great to be here. It's a great day, weather's pretty nice and we're fully into spring. It's not oppressively hot yet.
00:01:04 Martha Bassett
It is.
00:01:11 Joe Kendrick
Although it might be this weekend.
00:01:13 Martha Bassett
Might be.
00:01:15 Joe Kendrick
Today we're good though. 100 episodes tell us the story. For those of you of those in our audience that don't know about the Martha Bassett show, you're eight years in. How did it all start?
00:01:26 Martha Bassett
Well, it all started when Chris and Debbie Groner bought the building. That is the Reeves Theater, the the historic Reeves Theater. And it took them two or three years to renovate. And but Debbie had reached out to me and asked if if I would be interested in doing something regular. And my partner, Pat Lawrence said.
00:01:46 Martha Bassett
Oh yeah, we're going to have a show. We're we're going to call it the Martha Bassett Show and. After some time, he convinced me that this was a good idea, and when the theater opened up, we started this crazy endeavor that we have been joyously doing ever since. It has changed slightly over the years, but we always knew that we wanted to have. Equal numbers of female artists and.
Have variety, sort of like Prairie home companion. We we don't do the breadth of things that Prairie home did, but it's it's generally a musical variety show.
00:02:30 Joe Kendrick
It's a pretty big swing and it's not your first act, so you've been doing it for a while, eight years, but you've been doing a lot of things before this.
00:02:38 Martha Bassett
True.
00:02:38 Joe Kendrick
A lot of groups. You've got 11 records to your credit, Martha, and the Mood Swingers as well as your current band and you do lots of jazz, but you branch out into a lot of other things. So.
00:02:44 Martha Bassett
Yes.
00:02:50 Joe Kendrick
Really. What? What made you take the bite? It was something that I know you described the the premise on how it became available. But what really made you say I'm going to get married to this thing for eight years and running now and that's a while!
00:03:07 Martha Bassett
It is honestly, I was kind of nervous about it. At the beginning because I was. I had not been a presenter. I was an artist who was traveling around like all artists do, and I realized that that would ground me and I was kind of nervous about that. But then I realized, oh, I don't have to travel, I can just stay here and do this thing and bring all of the artists to me. And at first. Before people knew we were here, I, I mainly reached out to my friends and had them as my first guests and for a while. I had to explain every time I was reaching out to an artist that I didn't know what we were trying to do here, and now we at least have some name recognition and I have a lot of folks reaching out to me. So that makes my job a little easier, but it was, it was a big leap at the beginning and I'm really glad we did it.
Martha’s backstory includes a lot of time on stage with her own musical career, but it did not include a lot of experience presenting, as a host. This came into play when she led a Wednesday night Americana worship service intersecting faith music and secular music, where she met pastor Sarah Howell, who is now playing percussion and keyboards in her house band. That experience was a foundational step towards her show becoming a reality.
The intersection of music and faith fascinates me, and I put forward that you could easily argue that all music is spiritual on some level. Here’s Martha Bassett:
00:09:40 Martha Bassett
I absolutely feel that. All, that all music is sacred.
00:09:44 Joe Kendrick
Yeah. And then you've got a very feminine forward programming mindset. Plus you have this fascination with the Shakers, who were also very.
00:09:49 Martha Bassett
Yes.
00:09:57 Joe Kendrick
Uh, forward thinking in having women as leaders in the church when, well, that still remains controversial in a lot of churches today,
It does, doesn't it?
let alone the 1800s.So what about Shaker culture and Shaker music gets to you?
00:10:07 Martha Bassett
Oh, I love it so much. So my undergraduate degree in music was from the University of Kentucky, and our choir would spend a week there every summer reenacting a Shaker worship service. And. Gosh, it was fun and it -- that actually became my summer job when I was in school, I would dress like a shaker and go to the Shaker Village, and I would every hour for 15 minutes. I would sing Shaker songs for the tourists. And then when I came to North Carolina for grad school at UNCG. I really missed that music and I umI did my masters thesis on Shaker music.
00:11:00 Joe Kendrick
Well, a lot of hymns that are existing today, not a lot of shakers exist today for a lot of reasons,
No, two!
one really good reason is the celibacy thing. But all that aside.
00:11:07 Martha Bassett
yes.
00:11:14 Joe Kendrick
Their music, known especially for being beautifully melodic, but it didn't adopt harmonies, I think until later.
Right.
So tell us about that. What? Where do you plug in with that?
00:11:24 Martha Bassett
Yeah, the reason that the early Shaker music didn't have harmonies is because they it was. Music was used to teach that theology. And you know, remember, at this time, not everybody could read. And they also wanted to make it easy for the community to all learn the music and they, they were against people specializing and being experts at something. So they didn't bring in professional musicians to lead or anything. It was very much egalitarian.
00:12:01 Joe Kendrick
In the dances, what about the dances? They were almost Pentecostal. Perhaps. What's, they were, you know, originally called the shaking Quakers.
00:12:09 Martha Bassett
Right, right. The, the Dancing was organized and rehearsed during the week for the worship services, and it was very controversial at the time because, you know, dancing. Some churches still don't agree with dancing. I'm saying and.
00:12:25 Joe Kendrick
Well, the waltz was incredibly controversial from the jump. Just because people actually got that close, which is amazing to think about now.
00:12:33 Martha Bassett
Right. They touched each other. I know. Yeah, I could talk all day about Shaker history and these ideals of their how their theology works with the music and the dance. It's it's amazing. And art in general.
00:12:54 Joe Kendrick
Speaking of art in general nowadays, I wonder what your thoughts are on the state of the arts because, the times that we're in the news of the day, it's looking rather uncertain as far as you know, like look at what's happened with the Kennedy Center. I know you've got lots of sponsors and backing for this endeavor, which employs a lot of people. This is not a small operation. Myself at a public radio station.
00:13:14 Martha Bassett
Right.
We're in the same kind of boat as far as relying on some public funds and things, and we're thinking right now. Ohh. Not what if that will change, but that's probably going to change. Are you looking over your shoulder?
00:13:43 Martha Bassett
I am looking over my shoulder. And I'm trying not to obsess about it because there's so many things out of my control. What is? Under my control to a certain extent, nothing, nothing is really in your control, but just trying to present the best show that I can and I'm just trusting that. That the good is going to come out of this crazy time that we're living in and. I don't know. It's it's hard because, you know, we all hear the news and we know what's going on in the world and.
Gosh, Joe. I just have to believe in. The goodness of what we're doing. Not just quality, but good in the world -- our. Our hashtag or our theme for the show is good music for good people, and that's kind of a funny saying. But I also mean that, you know, we we want to present regardless of genre. We want to present good music, we want to work with nice people. And our audience is the best. They're so generous with the way they welcome our guests to the show, and they've been that way from the beginning and we have a core group that comes to almost every show.
And they welcome the other audience members in who are traveling, who might be tourists. And it's just a. A beautiful home that we have here at the Reeves Theater and I feel like we've created a real community. That genuinely loves each other. And our team definitely fits that category. We've had very, very little turnover. We've added people and we've lost a few people who moved away, but. I'm. I'm just trying to stay positive.
[Wayne Henderson and Friends intro from Martha Bassett into “Panhandle Rag”, excerpt]
00:00:01 Joe Kendrick
Wayne Henderson on WNCW and Southern songs and stories. So glad to see you tonight to play here in Elkin at the Martha Bassett Show. So good to talk to you.
00:00:11 Wayne Henderson
Well, great to talk to you. I'm glad to, like glad to be here and had a wonderful time tonight.
00:00:16 Joe Kendrick
It was a big time. Have you done this show before?
00:00:20 Wayne Henderson
Never done this show before, never have, but I have played on WNCW before.
00:00:25 Joe Kendrick
That's right, you have with a certain Doc Watson, I believe, yeah.
00:00:27 Wayne Henderson
Yeah.
00:00:31 Joe Kendrick
Wonder about what's up with you lately? I know you got to talk a little bit on stage about what you've been doing with. Of course, building guitars and now mandolins and things. But what? What's what's your day like? What's good about today?
00:00:42 Wayne Henderson
Well, that's that's about always my day, just in the shop working on those guitars. I've I'm working on number 955 guitar and that mandolin I had tonight’s one of the last things I've finished this number 154.
They don't make as many mandolins that I do guitars, but there's a lot of work in those things.
00:01:07 Joe Kendrick
Does it take longer or?
00:01:08 Wayne Henderson
Yeah. They're like a carved instrument, like a violin. You know, that top and back starts out with a piece of curly Maple or spruce. That's 3/4 of an inch thick. And you have to shape it down from the outside till it looks like a mandolin and and then then you got to carve out the inside. So it's the. Proper thicknesses and there's all kinds of.
Things like graduations at college, you know, it's got to be thicker right in the middle than it is anywhere else, and it gets down to thin. And that lets that whole top plate and the back vibrate better. And that's a sort of a more science than I know anything about. But I know how to shape them.
00:01:47 Joe Kendrick
You know well, there's a lot of science to it, but there's also. A lot of. I don't know what you would call it, but I've I've been around enough luthiers and heard enough stories of building instruments to know that the conditions and the sort of the mindset and the the emotions and everything that's going on during the time that you're building a guitar, especially the guitar builder, the luthier. Building the instrument? Yeah, themselves. Like that is a very big factor and it's really spooky sometimes about what comes out of that. Have you witnessed, are I? Am I? Am I even close?
00:02:25 Wayne Henderson
Well, yeah, that's for sure. That's absolutely stuff like that goes on and you. You know, I guess that piece of wood grows in a tree, which is no, no two options exactly alike. Probably. And. And you cut that piece of wood out of it, it makes a sound and a ring and a vibration that that's like. Not the last piece of wood you worked on, so you you have to sometimes figure that stuff out by tap. They call it tap toning, you know, you pick up a piece of wood and and tap on it and it makes a certain tune and you have to sort of figure out how that tone works together with the next piece of wood you're going to glue to it and you know, stuff that's especially big deal in violins. You know, they tune the top plate to. Spruce top and the Maple. Back town apart and you know the fiddle or violin. There's a sound post that connects them. You know, when they vibrate, they go together and it's supposed to be like a harmony thing. And. And you have to listen to those pieces of wood. Ever, ever piece of wood that I put in an instrument that almost everyone of ‘em, I'll pick it up and tap on it to just to see what it sounds like and hear it ring, you know, and and that, you know, that would has has its own tone. You mentioned Doc there a while ago. He's, he hung around my shop quite a bit and he would.
You know, he's blind. He couldn't, couldn't see. But his hearing was absolutely amazing and he would pick up a piece of wood in my shop and hit it with his finger tap on enough to make it ring. And he said, son, that thing rings an F chord. That'll, that'll make a good sounding guitar, you know. And but if he could have been able to carve. And build things. He would have been a pretty amazing with his sense of hearing and tone that he had would have been something else.
[jump to]
00:09:26 Joe Kendrick
What are you looking forward to?
00:09:28 Wayne Henderson
Well, I'm getting 77 almost 78 years old. I'm just looking forward to being around a little longer maybe. And I would love to be around long enough to get to 1000 guitars. I guess right now that's one thing and and. And as I get older, I've got too old to play golf or fish or anything like that. And so I concentrate my energy on working in the shop and and making something that somebody enjoys, you know, and and I look forward to sometimes.
You know my guitar second handed bring tremendous amounts of money, you know, and more than I would ever charge. I never do that, you know. And if I charge prices like my guitars bring second hand. No musician or none of my friends would have one. They couldn't afford it.
And the so I I try to make a make this stuff mostly for fun. I don't try to make money doing this much. I make a little and have to keep the shop going but I enjoy making them for young folks that can't afford a guitar. And stuff like that. I do that quite a bit.
00:10:42 Joe Kendrick
Well, my advice would be to hold a few more back. Hold a few more back is my advice. Even though 52 like you, you, you, you made out like it was beat up and old and.
00:10:47 Wayne Henderson
Well, it is. How?
00:10:57 Joe Kendrick
It didn't look that bad to me!
00:10:59 Wayne Henderson
And that well, I mean that you're probably an instrument person that likes the looks of an old guitar. You know, I, I'd I'd rather see one like that than a brand new shiny.
00:11:04 Joe Kendrick
Oh yeah.
00:11:09 Wayne Henderson
Thing you know and look like you'd be afraid to touch it. You can scratch it and stuff like that, but that old guitar I. Made it all over pretty much all over the world. You know, I played it in Pakistan and and England and all sorts of places, you know and.
00:11:21 Joe Kendrick
Yeah. You, you probably know this the story of Marty Stewart and his mandolin when he joined Johnny Cash's band and Johnny Cash straight away. Scratched on it.
00:11:33 Wayne Henderson
Yeah. Oh yeah, scratch his name, signed it!.
00:11:37 Joe Kendrick
And and. Yeah, and and Marty was not prepared for that. And then it became. The most signed mandolin in country music.
00:11:47 Wayne Henderson
Ohh yeah I've I've seen that before. Yeah, yeah. Actually, Marty came to my shop recently this last month. There's A and he's he was with. There was a fellow that takes pictures. Stuff comes to the shop a lot. And I was out sitting down the bench out in front of the shop talking to him and a pickup truck drove up and I told that fella I was talking to that guy in the passenger side. And if that ain't Marty Stewart, it sure the heck looks like you. You know, when he got out, it was in. And Dale Jett brought him over. Dale is AP Carter's grandson. And I know him. You know, and and I'd met Marty before and, you know a little bit and he knowed who I was. But he wanted to come see my shop. So that was an honor, you know? And that's pretty cool.
Among the long list of names of musical greats to buy one of Wayne’s instruments are the aforementioned Doc Watson and Marty Stuart as well as Gillian Welch, Peter Rowan and Vince Gill.
[“I’ll Fly Away” Martha Bassett with Liz Longley, Hank Pattie & the Current, Wayne Henderson and Friends and house band, continuing as bed]
Collaboration is a part of every Martha Bassett Show, and it is remarkable to hear on the radio, let alone witness it in person: Martha joins in on guest artists’ songs regularly, and guest artists join in on any number of songs outside their own catalog, with everyone mostly learning these songs in short order. Some are familiar favorites like this, the show closer for episode 100 of The Martha Bassett Show, where everyone including the house band joined together for this rendition of “I’ll Fly Away”.
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This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available at www.osirispod.com. You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio at bluegrassplanetradio.com. Thanks to Martha Bassett and Pat Lawrence for making this episode possible, and to everyone on the show staff and at the Reeves Theater. This is not the first time I have been to the Reeves -- longtime Southern Songs and Stories listeners will likely remember past episodes with artists like Cristina Vane from her time at the Reeves as part of the Reevestock Festival lineup, as well as an earlier episode on Reevestock founders and Reeves Theater benefactors, the band Time Sawyer. Thanks also to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs. I am your host and producer Joe Kendrick, and this is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it.