JT’s Blue Tele

History:

Joe Glaser is a guitar luthier and pedal steel guitar player from Webster Groves, Missouri. His family moved around to Denver, Boston, California, New Mexico, and Italy when he was growing up. He moved back to California for college at Stanford where he majored in creative writing. While in the bay area, Glaser played in bands and worked on his bandmates’ guitars (including inventing his own electric guitar string bender mechanism based on his Sho-Bud steel).

Glaser moved to Nashville to build guitars in 1979. He made the yellow “Taxicaster” double-bender guitar Jimmy Olander used when recording Diamond Rio’s first album (including the hit “Meet In The Middle”), and Jimmy’s famous double-bender “Maybelle” Esquire. He built Ricky Skaggs’ Mandocaster and Purple B-Bender Tele. In 1983 he put the pickups and middle pickup blend knob in Brent Mason’s legendary primer grey 1968 Telecaster, and later put the B-Bender in it as well.

In 1984, Joe Glaser built JT Corenflos’ Blue Tele. JT had come to Nashville two years earlier and had just gotten a steady road gig with Joe Stampley. JT was using a royal blue Ibanez Blazer strat copy at the time, and commissioned Glaser to make a Telecaster style guitar with what came to be known as the “Nashville” pickup scheme: a Telecaster style bridge pickup, a Stratocaster style middle pickup, and a Gibson style neck humbucker.

The original neck came from a 1973 Fender Telecaster that JT owned. This neck stayed on the blue Tele until sometime after 1994 when JT bought a 1956 Fender Esquire (it has all of the traits of a 1957, but JT always called it a ’56). He loved the V-shaped neck on the Esquire, but preferred the sound of the blue Tele’s pickup configuration, so he asked Joe Glaser to swap the necks. It was this combination of the blue Glaser body with the ’56 Esquire neck that made up the guitar that JT played on hundreds of hits throughout his career.

Use:

From 1984 until his death in 2020, the blue Tele was JT’s primary instrument. He played it with Joe Stampley in the 1980s. He played it with David Lee Murphy in the mid-to-late 1980’s band The Blue Tick Hounds. In 1992 and 1993 JT wielded the blue Tele as part of a short-lived original group called Palomino Road. You can see JT laying down a raunchy groove on the blue Tele in 1994 at 12th & Porter with his friend Marc Rogers in this video.

When JT got a call to play on an Alan Jackson record because Brent Mason was unavailable, JT used the blue Tele on what became the 1997 number one hit There Goes.

From that point forward, JT constantly used the blue Tele to play perfectly placed guitar parts on hit songs. A very small sampling includes the following:


–19 Somethin’ // Mark Wills // 2002
–How Am I Doin’ // Dierks Bentley // 2003
–Lot Of Leavin’ Left To Do // Dierks Bentley // 2005
–Free & Easy (Down The Road I Go) // Dierks Bentley // 2006
–All My Friends Say // Luke Bryan // 2007
–Alright // Darius Rucker // 2008
–Feel That Fire // Dierks Bentley // 2009
–Little White Church // Little Big Town // 2010
–Country Girl (Shake It For Me) // Luke Bryan // 2011
–She Cranks My Tractor // Dustin Lynch // 2012
–Wagon Wheel // Darius Rucker // 2013
–What Makes You Country // Luke Bryan // 2017

Specs:

-1984 Joe Glaser body
-forearm and belly contours
-alder
-reverse control plate
-modern style 6-saddle brass bridge
-Seymour Duncan Vintage Stack bridge pickup
-Bill Lawrence middle pickup
-Seymour Duncan mini humbucker neck pickup
-5-way switch, 1981 CTS push/pull pot on the tone
-3 ply white/black/white pickguard
-neck is from a 1956 Fender Esquire that JT owned
-neck is a V shape
-non-original tuners
-some kind of compensated nut that hangs over the fretboard
-neck plate from a 1973 Telecaster

note 1: the blue tele originally had a 1973 Fender neck with big Sperzel locking tuners and a black (probably graphite) nut. The ’73 neck explains where the ’73 neck plate came from. At some point after 1994 JT got the 1956 Esquire with a V shaped neck. In his words, “I really liked the V shaped neck. I already had ‘old blue’ put together for awhile and liked the sound of the pickup configuration, so I just asked Joe Glaser to swap the necks on them.”

note 2: the neck that JT referred to as a ’56 shows every outward trait of a 1957 Fender neck. In October of 1956 Fender changed the neck shape from a fat, softer V shape to a smaller, harder V shape like JT’s has. Also, mid-way through 1956 Fender started changing the string tree from a round “button” style to a rectangular “butterfly” style like JT’s has, again pointing to JT’s neck coming from late ’56 at the earliest. On the Esquire body that the neck came from, the neck plate has the serial number -19418. A 1957 Esquire owned by Zac Childs (with a 1/57 neck date) has a neck plate with serial number -18933. Although Childs says the neck plates weren’t necessarily sequential because they were pulled out of large boxes at the Fender factory, he does say the serial number beginning with a “-” indicates 1957 or early 1958. Another factor that points toward 1957 is that JT’s Esquire neck has the string tree positioned closer to the nut than the Fender logo, which is extremely rare on 1956 Fender Teles and Esquires but very common on 1957 Teles and Esquires.

note 3: for most of JT’s career the blue tele had an early Seymour Duncan Vintage Stack from before Seymour Duncan put his name in white lettering on the top of the pickup. Sometime around 2017 a new Vintage Stack that did have the white Seymour Duncan lettering was installed. The picture at the top of this page is from 2008-2011, with no white lettering.

note 4: in the early ’80s Seymour Duncan had a matte finish sticker on the back of their Vintage Stack pickups that said “3B” and then a letter for the person who wound the pickup. Examples might be “3BA” or “3BX”. A 2024 picture of the “original” bridge pickup from JT’s guitar shows a gloss finish sticker that says “STKT3B” on the back. So the non-logo Vintage Stack that was replaced in 2017 was likely itself a replacement, perhaps in the ’90s or ‘2000s as the current Vintage Stacks (since 2014 at the latest) have a different sticker on the back that includes the date in the format YYYYMMDD.

note 5: a 2024 picture of the underside of the current middle pickup in the blue Tele shows a metallic silver sticker that reads:
“5 YEAR WARRANTY
Register: www.SwampKaster.com
Jzchak Wajcman dba BillLawrenceUSA.com”
This pickup was certainly not made in the ’80s because the internet didn’t exist, meaning it’s not the original Joe-Glaser-rewound, Mount Juliet, TN era Bill Lawrence pickup. The oldest archives of SwampKaster.com and BillLawrenceUSA.com are from late November 2002, so the pickup is likely from 2002 at the earliest.

note 6: at some point between 1984 and 1994, the switch tip got lost. At some point between 1994 and 2009, the tone knob got lost.