LeRoy Henry began playing the guitar when at 13, a junk man picked him hitchhiking on U. S. 1. The junk man said, “you look like one them boys, wanna play ‘lectric guitar.” LeRoy replied that he might like to get an acoustic so he wouldn’t have to get an amplifier also. The junk man returned a couple of days later with LeRoy’s first guitar, a six dollar sunburst Silvertone acoustic which was promptly purchased with lawn mowing money. After that LeRoy studied with Ted Connors at Daytona Beach Community College. Ted had taught 2 of LeRoy’s heroes, Duane and Greg Allman, when they were young. He also studied music theory with Dr. Lee Eubank at the University of Central Florida. Ignoring his other teacher’s pleas at UCF that he get a backup career going by pursuing music education, he concentrated on performance playing bass and guitar in that University’s jazz bands and orchestras.



LeRoy landed a position as a Navy guitarist after that and attended the Navy’s school of music in Little Creek, Virginia where he studied with the renowned Navy musician Doug Forsiatti. He is seen in the picture above backing the former head of the Navy music program, Commander Mark Hammond. After leaving the Navy, LeRoy finally earned his doctorate in education and currently studies with Wolf Marshall. He has played with Bernard Purdie, the world’s most recorded drummer, members of Tower of Power, and warmed up for Roy Clark. Purdie said of LeRoy, “you’ve got the rhythm, there are plenty that don’t.” Roy Clark’s band members asked him how LeRoy got such a big sound of a such a little amplifier (a Fender Deluxe). He replied, it’s that guitar, the jazz box he plays, not the amplifier. Clark went on to tell LeRoy he heard a lot of heart in his playing and realized how much work it had taken to get there. He strongly encouraged him to continue his pursuit of music.



This book chronicles several years of study with the famous author and ground-breaking guitar transcriptionist, Wolf Marshall. Although LeRoy had been playing professionally for several years and had taken quite a bit of training at the time he started studying with Wolf he had not been able to improvise in the bebop style. It is the result of his efforts to take transcriptions done by Wolf, Dr. Jorge Hauser, Steve Kahn and others and translate them into usable, doable lessons in the jazz guitar style that include tablature and convey typical jazz guitar fingerings and techniques. Many of the original transcriptions that this work stems from were first done using a two speed tape deck. Because LeRoy was able to use the latest computer software he was able to achieve a level of accuracy that was impossible for the original transcribers because of the fidelity of the recordings they had to work with. This book takes Pat’s map of the neck and shows how it applies to his work improvising over standard chord progressions.