Harping on a unique guitarist

By Darrell Laurant

Published: December 1, 2008

Stephen Bennett will perform at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at The White Hart on Main Street in downtown Lynchburg.

Stephen Bennett lives a life with strings attached.  Most of them represent his myriad musical instruments, including several unique harp guitars. But others are more subtle, as Bennett alluded to during a concert at the Lynchburg Music Center on Nov. 1.

Midway through his performance, Bennett set down his guitar, picked up a container of water and swallowed a handful of pills.

“I had a kidney transplant not long ago,” he said, “and if I don’t take these, it could be bad.”

Then he picked up his instrument and resumed

playing.

There were only about 20 people in the audience on that night, a turnout that might have infuriated some musicians with Bennett’s worldwide reputation. He just smiled, bent over his work, and played for almost two hours.

“He’s a madman,” said Sid Hagan of Lynchburg, a fellow musician and longtime friend of Bennett’s. “He’d play all night if you’d let him.”

Certainly, the Tidewater resident — who is booked into the White Hart on Main Street on Thursday night (7:30) — has the repertoire for an extended marathon. Asked how many songs he has committed to memory, Bennett just smiled and said: “I don’t know. A lot.”

At the Lynchburg Music Center, he performed everything from Celtic tunes to upbeat jazz to the Beatles, his long fingers dancing across the strings, his long gray hair hanging down to frame his face. When he made a mistake, which was rare, he simply laughed and started over.

Maybe the fact that Bennett’s life almost became a requiem accounted for his laid-back demeanor. A bad day on stage is always better than a good day on an operating table.

“In March,” he wrote on his Web site, “both of my kidneys were removed as a result of the progression of an inherited disease I have (or had, at any rate) called PKD (polycystic kidney disease). I subsequently went on dialysis for a couple of months and then in May, thanks to an act of generosity, I received a kidney transplant. My new kidney (courtesy of Michael Leonard — THANK YOU, MICHAEL!) is working beautifully. At the time of this writing, I am now approaching four months post-transplant and all is well.

“I have known this was coming for years, although I had no way of knowing how it would turn out.”

Michael Leonard, incidentally, is Bennett’s brother-in-law. He will no doubt write a song in his honor, if he hasn’t already, just as he did for President-elect Barack Obama. He has even put out a “Happy 100th birthday” CD in honor of his oldest harp guitar, a 1909 Dyer inherited from his grandfather.

“I went back and found the songs that were popular in 1909 and recorded my versions of some of them,” Bennett said.

In case you were wondering, a harp guitar is an odd-looking instrument that combines a guitar fret board with an additional number of open strings on a curved neck. As for Bennett, he is, to borrow a phrase from Neil Young, an “unknown legend.” In 1987, he won the prestigious National Flatpicking Championship in Winfield, Kan., and he has imprinted himself upon the music scenes of Chicago, Oregon and Long Island, places he lived before moving to Virginia.

And his fellow musicians have noticed. Alex Lifeson of the rock band Rush recently saw Bennett play in Toronto, looked him up, and learned some things from him that he incorporated into the new, largely acoustic Rush album.

Even with that sort of star validation, however, you can bet that Stephen Bennett will be happy to be at the White Hart on Thursday night. These days, he’s happy to be anywhere.