Grandfather of Rock and Roll: Fender Telecaster Guitar

Leo Fender's Telecaster guitar and Precision bass changed the face of popular music....

One evening in July 1951 a solitary light burns in the otherwise darkened Fender workshops on Pomona Avenue. Leo Fender is working the night away, oblivious to the family dinners and other everyday activities going on across the rest of Fullerton, Los Angeles.

Leo is fiddling yet again with the string-length of his new baby. On the bench before him sits a prototype guitar which, in a few short months, will go on sale as the Fender Precision bass. We know now that it was to be his most revolutionary product, but Leo was unaware of this as he carefully screwed on the latest new length of neck to the scarred prototype body.

The coming sound of rock and roll would have been impossible had Leo not toiled on that night and many other occasions. Bearing in mind the non-musician Leo's own taste in music - singing cowboys The Sons Of The Pioneers are said to have been his favourites - then maybe he would have consigned the prototype instrument to his trashcan, given what it inevitably led to.

Fortunately for us he persevered. And if Fender's idea for a bass guitar was new - not to say downright shocking - the idea of an amplified bass was somewhat longer in the tooth. Gibson, Rickenbacker and Regal in the 1920s and 1930s had toyed with electric double-basses, though none was commercially successful - not least because of poor amplification. Makers knew bass players wanted louder instruments, but couldn't find a solution.

In the late 1940s Everett Hull at Ampeg had better luck when he amplified the existing acoustic double-bass, concocting a microphone that fitted inside the pointed spike or peg that supports the instrument at its base. This 'amplified peg' gave Hull's company its name (Ampeg) and the scheme proved a moderate success.

Four-string guitars already existed, but these 'tenor guitars' were quite different in purpose to bass guitars. When tenors had first appeared in the 1920s they were aimed primarily at encouraging players to move from the old-guard banjo to the newly popular guitar. The idea of a fretted bass wasn't new, either. Ancient multi-string fretted bass instruments had been around at least as far back as the 17th century, while at the beginning of the 20th, Gibson made a small number of their upright four-string fretted Mando Bass.

There's even evidence of an actual electric bass guitar pre-dating Fender's Precision. Paul Tutmarc, a Hawaiian guitar player and teacher based in Seattle, Washington, set up a company called Audiovox to manufacture a variety of electric instruments, including an electric bass guitar, in the 1930s. This was an astonishingly early electric bass guitar design, and Tutmarc must at least be noted as a man with remarkable foresight, if little commercial luck.

Of course, none of this detracts from the huge significance and importance of Fender's introduction of the solidbody electric bass guitar in 1951, as well as a fine new bass amp, the Bassman. But there were few well-known players of the P-Bass in its early days. No one knew quite what to do with the bass guitar, and the role of bass guitarist did not yet exist. Lionel Hampton's jazz band used a Precision, and an otherwise bemused critic admitted that the outfit's bass guitar was a "sensational instrumental innovation". But it wasn't until later in the decade and the arrival of rock'n'roll that electric bass found its true home. A key moment came with the 1957 Elvis track Jailhouse Rock where Bill Black, previously a double-bass player, is clearly audible on Fender bass. Everybody, let's rock! Jamerson, Sting and all the other P-Bass greats were just a pluck away.
Leo Fender had set up his Fender Manufacturing company in 1946, at first making electric lap-steel guitars and small amplifiers, surviving near-crippling cashflow problems to come up with an astonishing six-string solidbody guitar four years later. Early versions were called the Esquire and then the Broadcaster, but of course we know it as the Telecaster. It was the world's first commercially marketed solidbody electric guitar.

Leo had started work on the Tele design in the summer of 1949. Early prototypes borrowed the three-tuners-a-side peghead design of his lap-steels, but the production version had a smart new headstock with all six tuners along one side, allowing strings to meet tuners in a straight line, removing the need for the traditional angled-back headstock. The simple, effective instrument with its basic, single-cutaway solid slab of ash for a body and separate screwed-on maple neck was geared to mass production. The body was finished in a yellowish colour known as blond.

Fender's new solidbody electric guitar was unadorned, potent and ahead of its time. As such it did not prove immediately easy to sell, as Fender sales head Don Randall found when he took some samples to an instrument trade show. He had to suffer other companies laughing at the plain new Fender solid and calling it everything from a canoe paddle to a snow shovel. But Don and Leo had the last laugh when a few short years later these same companies were falling over themselves in the race to get a solidbody on to the lucrative new market created by Fender.

Early Tele men included the remarkable West Coast session man Jimmy Bryant, but again it was rock and roll that eventually provided the guitar's natural habitat. Take a listen to 1950s records by the likes of Luther Perkins with Johnny Cash or James Burton with Ricky Nelson to hear the new solidbody Fender in ear-bending action. The Shadows' Bruce Welch also favoured it as a rhythm guitar.
After a couple of false starts the Telecaster name was on headstocks by April 1951, and Fender's premier solidbody electric had a permanent identity, and a price of $189.50. During October the new Precision Bass joined the line, for $10 more than the Tele. Translated into today's money, that means you'd need about £910 and £960 respectively.

The Telecaster and Precision were typical of Fender's early products in that they had an elegant simplicity and were geared to easy, piece-together construction. Leo would always opt for function over looks. When I was researching The Fender Book back in 1992 I interviewed Leo's second wife, Phyllis, who'd lived with him for the last 11 years of his life. He loved cameras, she told me: "He'd sit in his room for hours playing with his cameras, then he'd go outside and take pictures of trash cans. I'd say, Honey, why are you doing that? Oh, I was just trying out these lenses and filters. So why not take a picture of a tree? They were just something to photograph, he'd tell me. They were near the back door and I didn't have to go far. Convenient, you know?"