BUCK OWENS & THE SILVER SPARKLE

A Fender ad from 1965 featuring Buck Owens & Don Rich with their sparkle Teles. Image courtesy of Terry Foster.

While Dick Dale, Kathie Marshall and Eddie Bertrand were riding the surf wave on the coast, country players were kicking up dust in Bakersfield. “You start to see it in that late 60s period – where it was the surf kids at first, then you have the country guys,” says Terry Foster. “They’re wearing their Nudie suits, they’re rhinestone cowboys, and that naturally turned into ‘I need a sparkle guitar to match.’”

Arguably the most significant sparkle Fender ever made was a Telecaster® crafted for one of those original rhinestone cowboys, Buck Owens. Together with his best friend and Buckaroo Don Rich, Owens pioneered the countrified twang that would come to be known as the Bakersfield Sound. And at its core, Foster emphasizes, “that sound is just Fender. It’s a Tele through a high-powered black panel Fender amp, on that bridge pickup, played close to the bridge – there’s the Bakersfield sound.”

And if the Bakersfield Sound had a signature finish, it would surely be a silver sparkle. In 1964, Fender built a special set of Teles for the country duo as a gesture of gratitude and presented them around 1965. Decked out in black “cowboy” rope binding with matching sparkle headstocks, the guitars featured an eye-catching sparkle finish made of crushed glass mirror. The pair can be seen playing the guitars in a vintage Fender ad circa 1965, pictured above, from Terry Foster’s archive. “Buck and Don are the only artists ever to appear in a Fender ad during that period with sparkle guitars,” notes Foster. “Fender would give dealers stacks of artists’ 8x10s that they’d give out to kids – and that’s the only time sparkle appeared in a pre-1970 Fender ad.”

Sparkle guitars might be a staple in country music today, but it didn’t start out that way. “The average country guy in 1963 was pretty conservative. Before that music was pretty regional. The first big national stars playing Fender were the guys playing the Lawrence Welk show. There was no way Lawrence was going to have the fellas playing some sort of sparkle guitar on set.” But by the mid-60s there was a switch. “The bigger artists like Buck and the boys are wearing these flashy Nudie suits all over the country. They’re showing their creativity. And just like Nudie [‘The Rodeo Tailor’] didn’t make the same design twice – so you didn’t turn up in the same suit as someone else – it was the same with these sparkle guitars.”

While opinions differ on the original color of the glass sparkle Teles, Davidson and Mark Kendrick, a Founding Master Builder in the Fender Custom Shop, believe the guitars started out silver. “Fender experimented with the crushed glass finish and then cleared over it with a nitrocellulose lacquer. That’s why the guitars started out silver and then turned a kind of gold color, because the cellulose [lacquer] in the finish turned yellow with age – like an old piece of scotch tape in your grandmother’s photo album,” says Davidson.

Pictured above: The 1964 crushed glass Telecaster as seen in the Custom Shop

As one might imagine, working with crushed glass was no easy feat. “George Fullerton once told me the process of finishing those guitars was a real pain,” says Kendrick. “The glass would settle at the bottom of the spray cup, so they constantly had to agitate it by hand and the glass wouldn’t flex going through the siphon tube and out into whatever it was they were spraying. Metal flake, on the other hand, would flex a little, so it would atomize better and be more evenly applied. Today, the flake is made out of polyester, which flexes even greater so the finish comes out more even.”

By 1966, Fender had officially brought sparkle in-house and presented Buck Owens and his Buckaroos with a more refined set of Telecasters, along with a matching Jazz Bass, all in metal flake. Unlike the original crushed glass models, which had a rough, almost pebbled texture, the new ones were covered with polyurethane and smooth to the touch. Buck and Don played the sparkle Teles throughout their careers – perhaps most famously on the popular country variety show Hee Haw. By the time the first episode aired in 1969, half of America was watching in color. All that glitters may not be gold, but those sparkle Teles sure looked good under the studio lights.

Today, one of the original crushed glass Teles – once owned by Fender executive George Fullerton – is in Davidson’s collection, and another hangs behind glass in the Fender Custom Shop. It’s a fitting home for what is quite possibly our first in-house sparkle – a guitar that captures the spirit of innovation that has defined Fender from the start. Over the years, Fender and the Custom Shop have created sparkle guitars for everyone from Dick Dale and Marty Stuart to Brad Paisley, Jack White, J Mascis and Blu de Tiger. In 2024, 60 years after Fender presented Buck with the first crushed glass sparkle Tele, we released the Limited Edition Buck Owens Telecaster; a hot-rodded red, silver and blue sparkle that tips a hat to the one that started it all.