THE RUNDOWN

While Leo Fender and the staff of his small Southern California instrument- and amp-making company knew that they’d built a revolutionary new guitar when they introduced the Telecaster in early 1951, they had no idea of the size and scope of the musical revolution their unusual new invention would start. They couldn’t possibly have.

It was not a foregone conclusion that such an instrument would succeed; indeed, some scoffed and laughed at the Telecaster when it was officially unveiled that year at the industry’s largest U.S. trade show, mocking it as a “boat paddle” and a “snow shovel.” This kind of derision didn’t last long, though.

That’s because players quickly realized that Fender had given them something not only new and unusual, but something well-designed, easy-playing, efficient, rugged, affordable and, above all, great-sounding. Although electrified guitars had been around in various forms since the 1920s, Leo Fender and his inner circle had labored mightily throughout the close of the 1940s and the earliest dawn of the new decade to design and perfect something that really didn’t exist before—a mass-produced solid-body Spanish-style electric guitar.

THE GUITAR

As innovative as it was, little if anything was fancy about the Telecaster. Several of its features were carried over from the Hawaiian steel guitars Fender had already been making since 1945, such as the “ashtray” bridge cover, knurled chrome knobs, Kluson tuners and combination of bridge and bridge pickup in one integral unit. If the maple neck broke or became too worn, there was no complex luthiery involved—you just screwed on a new one. It had a simple black pickguard (of fiber or Bakelite) held on with five screws. Unlike many existing guitars at the time, the Telecaster’s strings were pulled straight over the nut, with all the tuners on one side of the headstock—ideas that Leo himself said he borrowed from 19-century Istrian folk guitars and Viennese Staufer guitars.

The controls were another matter. True, the layout was simple—two knobs and a three-position switch, but their combined function was not as simple as might be supposed at first. The front knob always controlled master volume, but the rear knob was not always a master tone knob. In 1951, putting the selector switch in the rear (bridge) position delivered both pickups, with the rear knob serving as a blend control that governed the amount of neck pickup sound mixed into the bridge pickup sound. The selector switch in the middle position delivered the neck pickup only with its “natural” mellow tone (its chrome cover soaked up extra capacitance), and the switch in the front (neck) position delivered the neck pickup only with extra capacitance that produced a bassier tone; the rear knob affected neither of these settings.