From: Buddy McPeters
Date: December 17, 2002
Here's an interesting bit of info I ran into regarding Bob Wills and a guitar he owned. Bob bought a new Martin D-45 in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1941. There are photographs of Bob playing this guitar while playing '2nd' (rhythm) for his father Uncle John Wills while he fiddled a breakdown. I believe this is the same guitar Harley Huggins played in the movies he made with Bob Wills the following year.
Here's the URL: http://www.themomi.org/museum/singcowboys/JackieKidMoore1934MartinD-45_1941MartinD-45.html
Bob Wills first became acquainted with Leo Fender during the time he and the band spent in California making those movies. They played a number of dances at Santa Monica Ballroom as well as the Venice Pier where Foreman Philips promoted huge dances that he put on with big name acts. Leo Fender wasn't building guitars yet, but was a radio repairman from Fullerton, CA who was the hired contractor who set up the PA sound system and the stage lighting.
Fender was an opportunist and a visionary as well as being an engineer, an electronic genius and a manufacturing icon. He became associated with many name bands and their musicians because he was an able repairman who fixed and maintained the guitars and steel guitars and the amplifiers that they used. The use of electric instruments and amplification was less than a decade old when Fender began making improvements along with the repairs on steel guitars owned by Leon McAuliffe and Noel Boggs. Soon he was called to service guitars and amps for Eldon Shamblin and Junior Barnard, and later Jimmy Wyble and Cameron Hill during the war. In one of Fender's own history books Leo Fender himself stated that the Fender Musical Instrument Company most likely wouldn't have been as successful if not for his association with Bob Wills and Spade Cooley and their eclectic musicians who offered ideas and advice concerning improvements which in turn caused Fender to make history and setting a new standard in the products they made, even surpassing Gibson's standards.
In addition to the Western Swing musicians Leo supplied, he also gave away instruments to star players and soloists like Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West. As time went on in the immediate post war years Fender became the most desired steel guitar and amplifier on the west coast. McAuliffe, Boggs, Herb Remington and Joaquin Murphey as well as many others, all were given complete matched units. Soon in 1948 Leo launched his electric standard solid body guitar, the Telecaster, which was first called a 'Broadcaster' then a 'No-caster' before the tradename Telecaster was decided upon. Leo gave away Telecasters to Wyble and Hill who both played them briefly, preferring the big arch-top guitars with the more 'jazzy' Gibson sound. Leo gave Eldon Shamblin one of the Telecasters and Eldon took it back to him the next day and told him, "Leo, I don't want to play one of these little 'two-by-fours'. It doesn't look right and it doesn't sound right. I tried one of these little 2X4's that Rickebacker gave me shortly after I joined Wills in '37 and the old man didn't like it then and he don't like it now."
About 5 years later Leo called Eldon and asked him to come to the Fender factory and told him he had a guitar he wanted him to try. This was early in March 1954 and he was in CA to record with Bob Wills on what would be their final MGM recording session. Eldon went by and picked up the guitar which was a demonstrator model of the newly designed Fender Stratocaster. Eldon took the guitar and told Leo, "Well, we have some records to make while we're here and then we have to go on a tour up into Oregon and Washington and we won't be back until the end of the month. I'll take it and try it. Maybe the old man won't mind and who knows, maybe I'll like it too." Eldon played the guitar on a few of the songs during the March 1954 MGM session alternating between a big Gibson electric he had borrowed from Billy Strange who was playing with Cliffie Stone's band. Earlier that year Wills and his Texas Playboys had came west from Texas and set up headquarters in L.A. playing over KXLA.
Eldon's main guitar, the 1937 Gibson Super 400 he had bought from Bob had suffered some severe damage during the trip. Upon opening the guitar case he discovered the instrument had imploded; a result of all the years it had been transported across the country in the luggage compartment on Wills Playboy Limited bus. All the severe desert heat and cold from the mountains in the Rockies and Sierra's had taken it's toll and the guitar was caved in and the neck disjoined. Eldon borrowed one of several guitars loaned to him by Billy Strange while he searched for a replacement instrument.
When Leo gave Eldon the Stratocaster it marked the beginning of a new era. It set a new standard in Western Swing guitar. Eldon is the first man to record with that instrument and the first to play the guitar on a National tour first up into the Great Northwest and then into the Southwest into Texas and Oklahoma.