We really don’t know exactly when, because there are no other markings inside these guitars. The earliest pot date I have is a late-1948 pot date, but I’m sure the guitar itself was put together in 1949. It would be hard for me to nail down a date and, in fact, you can only date by pot dates they weren’t putting neck dates on these guitars yet. “The guitar takes shape in drawings in 1948, and becomes a guitar, a working specimen, in 1949. Sometimes he’d gift those guitars onto those people sometimes he’d modify them many, many times over and hand them back out again to be used, until he could come up with what he thought was the perfect formula. He would use everybody, from Rex Gallion to Bill Carson and other local players, to go out and experiment with these guitars.
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He also experimented with chambered bodies and solid bodies to try and find the right combination. And he experimented with different types of wood, primarily pine. “He experimented with parts that were basically lap-steel parts in the beginning: pickups and such. “He used his core group of local talent players to bounce instruments off,” David Davidson explains. Crucially, Leo’s clients on the country music scene provided a ready-made focus group helping him to design and refine his next and boldest innovation - a conventional ‘Spanish’ guitar with a solid body that made use of the lap-steel technology he’d been perfecting since 1946. But despite its dissimilarity to a conventional guitar, it - and the range of multi-neck electric Fender lap steels that followed - offered compelling evidence that stringed solidbody electric instruments not only worked but sounded great and were well-liked by the musicians who used them. This had a slab-like horizontal body supported by legs, like a table. He would use everybody, from Rex Gallion to Bill Carson and other local players, to go out and experiment with these guitars He’d also built a twin-neck steel guitar for Noel Boggs of Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys Western swing band - a huge act that played to 10,000 people every week.
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These were designed for the electric lap-steel players of the era’s country bands.
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He’d launched a range of wooden-cabinet valve amplifiers including the Princeton, Deluxe and Professional the year after the war ended. It now resides in the Songbirds museum in Tennessee (Image credit: Neil Godwin / Future) Testing timesĮven in 1949, Fender had a few successes under his belt that suggested a solidbody electric might be the way forward. A one-off Sunburst twin-pickup ‘double Esquire’ built in 1950 for early adopter Verlin Whitford.