![]() ![]() “I make pies, so I can pay for my rock-and-roll habit,” he says. Henry found that selling pies gave him the extra income he needed. “If you’re a musician, you’re a musician.” Life on the road didn’t always pay the bills, though, especially with a wife and young children. with an eight-to-10-member “low-echelon” band. “It encourages conversation.”īut music also beckoned, leading him to tour the U.S. “Pie lets people talk to each other,” he says. More importantly, Henry began to realize the bonding aspect of the baked dish. He also found he could impress the girls with his homemade pies, recalling a Christmas past when he made a flaky offering (lard was his secret ingredient then) for a former young love, culling a recipe from a book called Pies and Tarts. ![]() “I’ve always been a pie guy since I was a little kid,” he sums up. But Henry also remembers being enamored early on with a 25-cent slice of apple pie at a local diner. He learned to bake cakes and bread as a teen from his grandmother and great-aunt, while visiting the family farm in Minnesota. It’s hard to say what came first: the musician or the baker. “Popes are the people you go to,” explains Henry, the band’s front man. His current band is the Glenmont Popes, named after his childhood neighborhood in Montgomery County and one of his favorite movies, The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) with Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts. “I was horrible.” He really learned to play the guitar when he was a Marine Corps grunt after high school, he says, jamming every night with the other recruits while stationed at a Naval weapons base in Northern California. “When I was 13, I did Beach Boy covers in junior high,” he says. Not that he was particularly gifted in the beginning. He’s been a professional musician since he was 24 but started with the trumpet in elementary school. Being a ’40s Rat Pack crooner was never an aspiration for Henry, who often sports colorful Western-style shirts, cowboy boots, and jeans while belting out the blues and strumming his Gibson guitar on stage. ![]() “My dad is so proud, though he asks me, ‘Why can’t you be like Sinatra?’” “My parents are super supportive,” he says. One of Henry’s most well-known songs is “Paperboy,” an homage to his days as a Washington Post delivery kid in Silver Spring, where he grew up in a middle-class suburban household with busy parents-his dad was a computer-company salesman his mom, a political activist-two sisters, and a brother. show at Bertha’s, he takes an entourage of friends-including his opening acts Alison Lewis and Don “Doop” Duprie, both from Detroit-back to the Guilford five-bedroom home he calls the “pie palace” and the “house that pie built,” where they jam until 7 in the morning. Not that his footloose lifestyle has changed. “I went to school to chase girls,” he says sheepishly. He ended his college career short of graduating. Henry has come a long way from his days on the campus of Towson University, where he majored in “fun” when not attending his mass-communications classes. Preston, who was on hand for Henry’s Fells Point show. He’s larger than life,” says local rockabilly musician Sean K. Henry is a presence with his noticeable tattoos-the pie wings are a favorite-and the distinctive brimmed hats covering his slick, shaved head. He’s become except he wears a leather jacket and that freakin’ fedora.” Lazlo Lee, the head baker at the Dangerously Delicious Pies in Canton, likens Henry’s burgeoning popularity to that of blues musician John Lee Hooker, who didn’t become well-known until he was in his 50s. “More people recognize me,” he acknowledges with his signature sly grin and mischievous blue eyes. After his summer run on the TV show-where he proclaimed that “pie style” is a way of life-he’s approached by fans at airports and other public places around the country. Recognition in his hometown is about as sweet as the popular Baltimore Bomb pies, made with Berger Cookies, that are sold at his Canton shop.īut he doesn’t just get attention here. He’s thrilled that one guy is wearing a Dangerously Delicious Pies T-shirt, a testament to the baked goods he started rolling out for sale 10 years ago. Henry, 48, greets them all, shaking hands and giving brotherly bear hugs. Wearing his trademark porkpie hat, he doesn’t go unnoticed as passersby nudge each other and whisper, “That’s Rodney Henry.” Baltimore’s Pie Guy/Music Man sits at an outdoor table in Fells Point on a balmy fall night, waiting for a gig to start at Bertha’s.Īs he sips his favorite indulgence-Jack Daniels and water-he shoots the breeze about everything from his recent appearance on Food Network Star to an upcoming month-long band tour that will take him from his hometown to Ohio and Texas and places in between. ![]()
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