Originally a full $35.00 less than it's Telecaster cousin…

This fifty-two-year-old Blond beauty weighs just 7.50 lbs. and has a nut width of just under 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 and 21 frets with 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 ("-21916") between the top two screws. One single-coil pickup, angled in bridgeplate, with a huge output of 7.03k. Single-layer white plastic pickguard (.06 inches thick) with five screws. Two controls (one volume, one tone) plus three-way "tone" switch with "top-hat" tip, all on metal plate adjoining pickguard. Potentiometers stamped "304 704" (Stackpole January 1957).Chrome knobs with flat tops and knurled sides. Telecaster/Esquire combined bridge/tailpiece with three steel saddles. The neck is dated in pencil "7-57" and the pickup cavity is dated in pencil "6/57". This guitar was most probably owned and played by a "slide" player and has significant surface wear to the maple fretboard but there are no divots in the fretboard from string bending. The frets have been expertly replaced and the guitar feels and plays like a dream. The lovely grain of the ash body shows very well through the Blond finish, and taking into account a small scratch on the top bass bout, a few very minor edge marks, some "good old wear" to the bass side of the neck, and the usual wonderful finish checking, this fifty-two-year-old gem is in remarkably fine and original condition and is one of the very best Esquires we have ever seen. Complete with its original "ashtray" bridge cover. Housed in its original Fender "Tweed" hardshell case with brown leather ends and red plush lining (8.00). 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!

"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).