An All Original 1957 Fender Esquire

This fifty-four year-old blond beauty weighs just 6.80 lbs. and has a nut width of just over 1 5/8 inches and a scale length of 25 1/2 inches. Solid ash body and fretted maple neck with a wonderful deep "V' profile, 21 original frets and black dot position markers. Single "butterfly" string tree. Headstock decal with "Fender" spaghetti logo in silver with black trim and "Esquire" in black below it. Individual "single-line" Kluson Deluxe tuners with oval metal buttons and "D-169400 / Patent No." stamped on the underside. Four-bolt neck plate with serial number "023916" between the top two screws. One single-coil, staggered pole-piece pickup, angled in bridge-plate, with a huge output of 7.05k. Single-layer white plastic pick-guard (.06 inches thick) with five screws. As is often the case with 1957 Fender guitars there is another number "-24865" on the underside of the neck plate. Two controls (one volume, one tone) plus three-way "tone" switch with black plastic "top-hat" tip, all on metal plate adjoining pick-guard. The potentiometers are stamped "304 732" (Stackpole August 1957). Chrome knobs with flat tops and knurled sides. Telecaster/Esquire combined bridge/tailpiece with three steel saddles. The neck is dated in pencil "10-57" and the pickup cavity is dated in blue pencil "9-57". The 'bluish' grain of the ash shows very nicely through the finish. There is some fine finish checking and a small amount of wear on the edges of the body. The frets are original and show some playing wear - but the guitar definitely does not require a re-fret. The maple fret-board is very clean but it certainly does show signs of playing wear. Complete with its original "ashtray" bridge cover. Housed in its original Fender "Tweed" hard shell case with brown leather ends and red plush lining (9.00). The price in 1957 was $164.50 for the guitar (a full $35.00 less than its Telecaster cousin)... plus a huge $49.50 for the case!

This is a very nice, all original example of a '57 Esquire with a wonderful deep 'V' neck profile and a sound to die for!

"Leo Fender's new solidbody was the instrument that we know now as the Fender Telecaster, effectively the world's first commercially successful solidbody electric guitar...The guitar was originally named the Fender Esquire and then the Fender Broadcaster, and it first went into production in 1950. It was a simple, effective instrument. It had a basic, single-cutaway, solid slab of ash for a body, with a screwed-on maple neck. Everything was geared to easy production. It had a slanted pickup mounted into a steel bridge-plate carrying three adjustable bridge-saddles, and the body was finished in a yellowish color known as blond. It was unadorned and like nothing else. It was ahead of its time (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of Fender, p. 10).

"After a false start the Esquire re-appeared...in 1951, now with Fender's new adjustable truss-rod. It was offered in single-pickup format only, but otherwise was virtually identical to the two-pickup Telecaster. However, the Esquire's three-way selector functioned as a preset tone control or bypass switch, offering wide versatility from a one-pickup guitar. Perhaps surprisingly, the Esquire stayed in the line for 20 years" (Tony Bacon and Paul Day, The Fender Book, p. 10).