Fender Telecaster
Musical instruments have traditionally been functional works of art; the Fender Telecaster was more like an industrial product.
It was simple, spare and in no way ornate. Leo Fender envisioned making instruments for working musicians, the kind of people that you might find playing Country music on a Friday night in some little beer joint. The idea was to keep the costs down and maximize function. In the Fender concept the neck could be replaced more easily than it could be re-fretted.
Mr. Fender enjoyed one other advantage, he had no tradition to uphold.
It all started with a radio repair shop that built PA systems on the side
and then eventually guitar amps. Soon thereafter the idea of
building steel guitars was added and then the electric-Spanish guitar,
which became the Telecaster. As the photo shows it wasn't a threat to the ornate beauty of a Gibson L-5 or even an ES-175. It did, however, sound
like no other guitar. The solid body and the hand-wound single-coil pickups gave it a treble bite that had never been heard before.Country players loved it and it would soon prove itself useful in the emerging style known as Rock & Roll. The Tele has been used by plenty of Blues players and even as a Jazz guitar and all of this started with a guitar that looked like it could have been made in someone's basement.
It's not literally the first solid body guitar but it was the first
solid body to become a successful product. You can buy a
Telecaster today and it's not much different from the Tele you could
have bought in 1950.
The solid body had arrived and Gibson realized that they needed to take
this development seriously. Their answer combined the traditions
of a guitar company that had been in operation for 50 years with the
need to meet an emerging market that they had not anticipated.
