Waylon Jennings Broadcaster Neck Discovery

Take a trip back to the mid 70's to Santa Monica CA where I was living
with my older brother.  We made a guitar swap trade with a young couple who lived in the house next door. They had what appeared to be an older Fender 50's Telecaster that had been around the block a bit.

The couple knew close to nothing about the Telecaster in their possession.
Neither of them were anything more than novice guitar players and were more interested in the parts built strat style guitar we swapped for their Telecaster as it had a strat vibrato bridge.

At that time my brother and I had been active chasing down vintage guitars in southern California for about a decade, however we were unable to figure out the exact lineage of this modified Telecaster.
The headstock had it's contour cut straight and the body had been stripped and poorly refinished to look a bit like Bruce Springsteen's tele on his Born to Run album cover.

Fast forward from 1976 Southern California to Seattle in 1990 where I had just relocated to work at the Boeing Missile facility as a staff engineer with Hughes Space and Communications.

By this time information on dating Fender guitars was easily available and we determined that what we had was a 1957 Fender Telecaster body with all original hardware and beat up tweed Fender case.
The neck turned out to be an unsigned Broadcaster neck with original tuners.

I found a talented luthier in Paul Stroh who took on the task with repairing the headstock to original specs and also with refinishing the body to an appropriate 1957 spec.

Paul Stroh did a great job with the makeover.

 Here are post rework photos with original tweed 1957 case and 1956 Tweed Tremolux amp

 

Fast forward to the present.

I purchased a rather large and hefty book called "the blackguard" a detailed history

of the early Fender Telecaster years 1950 - 1954.

Viewing through the blackguard book I came across this photo showing music legend Waylon Jennings holding this Fender Telecaster sometime in 1974. 

At first I was surprised to see that someone else had clipped off the headstock quite similar to

the way ours had been clipped.

Upon closer inspection of the Waylon Jennings guitar I was surprised to see that it was

the same guitar neck that we had "reworked" to original.

You can see the details including the fretboard wear marks that assist in verifying the necks are one and the same.

 

 

 We failed to take any photos of the Tele guitar prior to getting the luthier work performed.
Close inspection of the above photo will show the glue line of the grafted maple on the headstock.

5 minute, no action video  demo of 1956 Tweed Tremolux amplifier using
the Waylon Jennings "Frankencaster".