The all-star Tele Town gig in Nashville marked 75 years of the timeless Fender Telecaster

On the stage of the Ryman Auditorium, country music’s ‘mother church’, the legends of Nashville and beyond are coming thick and fast, either in person or spirit. This is Tele Town, a one-off, all-star gig hosted by Fender, the strength of the bill speaking to the pulling power of the musical instrument company that makes the signature guitar of country: the Telecaster.

Sheryl Crow receives her flowers via a cover of her 2002 hit ‘Soak Up the Sun’ by Andrea Benz and Maggie Baugh. Emma Zinck leans into the iconic riff ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ in tribute to Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders. John Oates, of Hall & Oates, performs ‘Please Send Me Someone to Love’. Sister act Larkin Poe blow off the roof with the aid of surprise guest Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.

Game knows game: Ricky Skaggs plays ‘Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line’ in tribute to Waylon Jennings. Here’s Jack White, adoptive Nashvillian, with a fierce version of The White Stripes’ ‘Ball and Biscuit’. As the concert approaches its climax, country music superstar Brad Paisley – an arena-scale phenomenon in America – tears into his hits ‘The Nervous Breakdown’ and ‘Alcohol’.

And still the surprises keep coming. Gently ushered onstage in a chair is 86-year-old James Burton. The guitarist all-timer has played with everyone from The Everly Brothers to Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell to Suzi Quatro, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 by lifelong fan Keith Richards. He’s wearing the baseball jacket he wore on the final 1977 tour by an icon who’s long left the building: Elvis Presley. Paisley duly pays homage to one of the greatest guitarists in history, the OG exponent of the paisley-patterned Telecaster: he gifts Burton the 001 prototype of his bespoke ‘Lost Paisley’ guitar.

The near-three-hour show climaxes with most of the evening’s players back on stage. That means 14 guitarists letting rip on Telecasters to celebrate the 75th birthday of the foundational rock’n’roll and country and western instrument invented by Leo Fender. Not so much Tele Town as Tele City, an electrifying, wailing, thrilling symphony of twanging. If I wasn’t wearing cowboy boots when I entered the Ryman, I was when I left.

Fender’s Artist Showroom, East Nashville

The following morning, as the stage equipment from the concert is trucked in through a loading bay, I’m having a tour of Fender’s Artist Showroom. Located in the creative, hipster ’hood that is East Nashville, it’s a purposefully discreet location.

As Tim Shaw, the chief engineer who runs the guitar R&D department here, explains: ‘We are the ministry of the possible, and a lot of what we do is stuff that won't exist for a couple of years. That means that this design and manufacturing facility is ‘a no-camera, no phone, no recording zone… You've noticed there's no signage. There will never be signage. We’re not on Google Maps. We are deliberately hard to find. Amazon still has trouble.’

‘And all that is designed on purpose,’ adds Ben Blanc-Dumont, director of artist marketing, ‘because the primary role that we have here is to work with artists and be a place for them to come and be comfortable. It’s private, and it's about them engaging with us. So we are hiding in plain sight.’

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In pride of place on the second floor of this facility is proof of that artist-focused craftsmanship. The ‘Jack White shrine’, as Blanc-Dumont calls it, features core elements of the musician’s Fender Collection: his signature Triplecaster and Triplesonic Acoustasonic guitars, and his Pano Verb – a specialist amplifier that lets the musician ‘pan’ his reverb.

‘A lot of artist instruments, like the Jack White stuff, started downstairs [in the workshops],’ explains Shaw. ’Jack had ideas, stuff he wanted to try on tour… He would take prototypes out for a leg of a tour, and we'd try [different] pickups and he'd say, I'm not sure, what about this? So I make him something else and we try that. That went on close to a year-and-a-half.’

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But Fender’s artist-facing artistans and luthiers can do that. The small team here collectively have over 100 years’ experience building guitars. As Shaw says, they can build one of something, or they can build thousands of something at, for example, Fender’s flagship factory in Corona, California.

This means that ‘everything we do here is designed for manufacture’, says Shaw. Or, alternatively, ‘if an artist wants something idiosyncratic – like Jack has half-scalloped frets, starting at the 12th fret, on one of his guitars. And when we brought that guitar to Corona, Corona looked at that and took a hard pass. They were like, “Oh, no, we are not going to do this.” [But] if it's something we want to do, and it's one thing, great.’

That player-friendly utility and flexibility is ingrained in the grain of the company-founding creation of Leo Fender, a creator who was not a guitar player but an engineer. ‘Leo was looking to make a guitar for the working player,’ Edward ‘Bud’ Cole, CEO of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, tells me. ‘And it was all about tonality, reliability of use. You have to think back to how much discipline and pure signal he was working [with] as opposed to noise. He created something that was a full, intellectual, engineering distillation of perfection and not a single cell more. He wanted to completely reinvent what a guitar could be for the working-class musicians at that time.’

The result was a guitar that would shred its away across every varietal of rock, from 1950s rock’n’roll to late 1960s/early 1970s blues-rock to 1980s New Wave to 1990s indie-rock. Push him to choose a personal favourite exemplar of the Telecaster sound (‘fuck, it is a hard one, man…’) and Cole will highlight Jimmy Page and the first Led Zeppelin album (1969). ‘Everyone makes the mistake of thinking maybe it's another guitar. But that album was all recorded with a Telecaster. The Yardbirds used Telecasters, too.’

Then again, Cole admits he’s torn. He’s a Radiohead fan with direct experience of the Telecaster skills of their guitarist Jonny Greenwood. ‘I played in a band, Rain Convention, back in Arizona. And we did a bunch of shows with Radiohead on the “Creep” tour. We were playing clubs to a thousand people. And, I mean, those fucking guitar players, man!’

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For all that ubiquity in rock music, though, Nasvhille is Tele town. What is it about the sound of the Telecaster, I ask Fender president (Americas) Justin Norvell, that makes it and country music the perfect match? ‘It’s raw honesty,’ he replies. ‘Electric guitars before the Telecaster were more like jazz guitars, with a mellower sound. And this guitar had a much more present [sound]. It poked through in a way that announced itself and changed the direction of where music was going – to a point where it became the ubiquitous tool for country music.

‘The words people use – [country music’s] “twang” – is based upon the sound of the Telecaster,’ Cole continues, ‘it was a kismet, zeitgeisty intersection of the guitar as the music was forming. The guitar was there, and they grew together.’ Genre and instrument, in essence, ‘were intertwined from the roots.’

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It's this marriage of tool and creation that, to Cole’s mind, is best exemplified in Lucinda Williams’ 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. ‘That is a record with a clarity and a crispness to the guitars that is awesome. But I also love [The Clash’s] London Calling and [Radiohead’s] OK Computer,’ he adds with a smile. ‘The Telecaster wears so many different hats. But in its Western wear, that clean, bell-like, twangy, direct tone – it’s just like it's announcing itself and saying, “I’m here”.’

Now, three-quarters of a century on from its creation, the instrument is receiving a zing-up. The 75th Anniversary Telecaster Collection comprises five models channelling a heritage while also heralding a future – you can see a YouTube playlist here. Fans and players can choose from the Vintera Road Worn 1951 Telecaster, Ultra II Telecaster, American Professional Custom Telecaster, American Professional Classic Cabronita Telecaster or the Player II Telecaster.

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Or, of course, they can choose a road-proven machine hand-crafted by one of the greatest living guitarists – the Jack White Triplecaster. It is, says the man himself, a dream instrument born of a dream collaboration.

‘I’m loving my relationship with Fender,’ White tells me. ‘We’ve been working [together] five years now or more, trying to put all those together. They've really let me design, from scratch, all these new ideas – and put them into production. I can't thank them enough.’

As a ceaselessly inventive businessman with his own, multi-limbed company, Third Man (a record label, publishing house, hardware brand and more), he appreciates that it’s ‘easy to think up stuff. But to actually get a company to put some money behind it and actually make it real and put it into stores and stuff – it's a bigger deal than everyone thinks it is.’

Almost as big a deal as pulling together all those stars for Tele Town. How, I ask White, was it performing on stage with James Burton? ‘Oh, that was pretty cool man,’ he replies, beaming. ‘What an honour. It's amazing. And what a beautiful thing that Brad gave him that guitar … A lot of legends standing out there last night. Those are cool moments that this town [fosters]. Those things can only happen in Nashville.’

Fender.com, @Fender