I admit it, I’ve thought about what I would say if I ever won a Grammy. Ed Gerhard, the affable Center Strafford resident and brilliant finger-style acoustic guitarist, wasn’t even there when he won his. He was celebrating a friend’s birthday over Indian food in Connecticut. I like Indian food, too, but come now.

“I was going to fly out,” says a proud Gerhard on the phone from a Tennessee tour date. “But I had a concert the night before in Connecticut I didn’t want to sacrifice. So I took Alex (DeGrassi, a Connecticut resident and fellow musician) out for some Indian food, and came back and there was a message on the answering machine, ‘We won! <click>’ I didn’t even get to see it on TV.”

The ecstatic, if brief, message was from James Jensen, head of Solid Air Records, who had skipped the Indian food to attend the actual ceremony. It was Jensen who asked Gerhard to contribute a recording of “Moon River” to the Henry Mancini tribute compilation, “Pink Guitar.” Gerhard, Jensen and the other instrumental acoustic guitarists included, ended up winning the award for “Best Pop Instrumental Album.”

“We had a few cognacs that night, I tell you!” Gerhard says happily.

Gerhard brings his cheery, Grammy winning self to Portsmouth for two shows at The South Church on Friday, Dec. 16 and Saturday Dec. 17. Both shows will feature fellow finger-style guitarist Bill Mize, and the concerts will mark the 23rd year Gerhard has celebrated a Christmas show in town.

Even with the big award under his belt, Gerhard has his head on straight about it all. He’s as good an example of someone playing music for the right reasons as can be found.

“I’m just trying to do the best work I can do,” Gerhard says. “It’s really all about the quality of the work, it’s not so much about capitalizing on business opportunities. For the kind of music that I do, if you just focus on just doing good work, people tend to notice stuff like that.”

The “kind of music” Gerhard plays is instrumental acoustic guitar music, of the gorgeous variety. Gerhard is a virtuoso player with a knack for writing smart and complex yet accessible songs that, as another writer once noted, are “songs only a guitar can sing.” The Philly native came out guns a’ blazing with his 1987 debut “Nightbirds,” which earned widespread critical acclaim, including from The Boston Globe, which named it one of their top 10 picks of the year. Gerhard has added six more releases to his catalog, including two lovely holiday releases, 1991’s “Christmas” and 1997’s “On a Cold Winter’s Night.”

The Grammy recognition is the culmination of 18 years of countless hours in the “woodshed” and innumerable gigs on tours through the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. Gerhard’s fans are far and wide, too. You can count Oregon’s Breedlove Guitars as fans—big ones. If you’ve been a very good boy or girl, maybe you can ask Santa to bring you one of Breedlove Guitar’s Ed Gerhard custom signature guitars, which brought home Musician Magazine’s “Player’s Choice Award” in 2000.

It was the around the time of Gerhard’s first release in the late 1980s that he met Bill Mize, when both were featured on the Windham Hill guitar sampler in 1988. Gerhard’s song, “The Handing Down,” was included that year on the now prestigious compilation “I was playing some shows in Tennessee,” Gerhard says, “and I asked Bill if he wanted to play some of them with me. We’ve been brothers ever since.”

The Christmas concerts, Gerhard promises, will be a mix of the expected and the unexpected.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done the same show twice. Its a cool upbeat show, it’s not going to be one of those sedate affairs,” he states. “I’ve had people that have been coming to these things every single year I’ve done them for 23 years. So the fact that the people keep coming back means they’re getting what they came for, but they’re also getting something new each year.”

Talking to Gerhard, it’s easy to hear that he’s genuinely happy about having his old friend on board for the musical Christmas festivities to come.

“I love to show people what my friends can do, too,” he says, so I’ll turn Bill loose on some solo stuff, and I’ll do some of that too, but most of the show will be duets.”

Dedication to craft will be paramount, as it is throughout his work.

“If you do anything that’s got resonance and meaning and purpose now, it’s still gonna be relevant years from now,” Gerhard says. “People still buy my back catalog stuff to see what (I) did before. I don’t think people buy a Spice Girls record and say ‘Oh Man! I’ve got to find out what they did on their last album!’ I’m in a different music business than that.”

With that in mind, there are things Gerhard wishes more younger musicians would realize without having to go through the major label ringer first.

“Signing a five-record deal is not making it,” says Gerhard. “The pie in the sky ideal of getting a five-record deal, or signing with a major, rarely turns out to be to the artist’s advantage. A lot of people think about getting a record deal as the goal, and not what’s beyond that goal.”

“I’ve had enough feedback and support and enough people buying the records and coming to shows, that I know that if I’m being true to myself, then I’m going to be true to my audience,” Gerhard says. “That for me is what the career part is.”

As for the future, Gerhard has an album of blues based material that should be out before the snow melts and the first rainy days of spring arrive. That’s a ways off, though. Until then, bask in the holiday hubub, and try and keep the coal out of your stockings. Ed Gerhard will be spreading good cheer the best way he knows how, by making his guitar do the Christmas caroling for him.