Mike Henderson
Mike Henderson was a mandolin player, guitarist, harmonica player and songwriter from Independence, Missouri, who worked in Nashville from the 1980s until his death in 2023. He co-founded the SteelDrivers with Chris Stapleton and wrote much of their early repertoire with him, and their later songs together for Stapleton’s solo records included “Broken Halos,” which won the Grammy for Best Country Song in 2018.
He was born Michael James Henderson on 14 July 1953 and grew up in Independence. Bluegrass was his first love, and he started playing it at eighteen. In college he met the banjo player Mike Fleming, and the two played in a bluegrass band through college and after, until about 1981, barely making a living. Henderson then turned to rock and roll and the blues, music he knew from his mother’s records by B. B. King and John Lee Hooker, and moved to Nashville, where he became a staff songwriter for EMI. From the mid-1980s he led a Monday-night blues band at the Bluebird Cafe, a residency that lasted nearly forty years.
In 1994 he made his only major-label solo album, Country Music Made Me Do It, for RCA, and that year he co-founded Dead Reckoning Records with Kevin Welch, Kieran Kane, Harry Stinson and the fiddler Tammy Rogers. His own Dead Reckoning releases were Edge of Night and First Blood (both 1996) and Thicker Than Water (1999); from 1996 he also led the blues band Mike Henderson & the Bluebloods. In 2001 he toured with Mark Knopfler on the Sailing to Philadelphia tour. As a session player he recorded on mandolin, guitar, slide guitar and harmonica with Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Patty Loveless, Waylon Jennings, Lucinda Williams, Albert King, John Hiatt and others, and his songs were recorded by the Dixie Chicks, Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Travis Tritt, Gary Allan, Kenny Rogers, Randy Travis, Marty Stuart and the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
The SteelDrivers came together in the summer of 2005 and took shape as a band the next year, with Henderson on mandolin, his frequent co-writer Stapleton on guitar and lead vocals, Rogers on fiddle, Fleming, now on bass, and Richard Bailey on banjo. Their first two albums for Rounder, The SteelDrivers (2008) and Reckless (2010), brought three Grammy nominations and the IBMA’s Emerging Artist award in 2009, and all but four of their songs came from the Henderson and Stapleton catalog, among them “Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey,” “If It Hadn’t Been for Love,” “Midnight Train to Memphis” and “Where Rainbows Never Die.” The band also appeared in the film Get Low. Stapleton left in 2010 and Henderson followed in December 2011, though songs by the two of them still filled part of the band’s third album. Adele recorded “If It Hadn’t Been for Love” on her 2011 Live at the Royal Albert Hall.
When Stapleton’s solo career took off, he recorded more of their songs, among them “Second One to Know,” “Death Row,” “Nobody’s Lonely Tonight” and “Midnight Train to Memphis.” “Broken Halos,” from From A Room: Volume 1 (2017), won the Grammy for Best Country Song at the 60th Grammy Awards in January 2018 and the CMA Song of the Year the same year, and “Starting Over” was the CMA Song of the Year in 2021. The Mike Henderson Band released If You Think It’s Hot Here… in 2015, and on 23 July 2022 he joined Stapleton on stage at Wrigley Field in Chicago for “Midnight Train to Memphis.” Henderson died in his sleep on 22 September 2023, at the age of seventy.
