Today at Vintage Vault we’re pleased to have an extraordinary piece, not only in full original conditions but one of those that survived to the passing of Time like if it was just made the other day.
This beautiful guitar is a Fender Stratocaster in custom color “Blond” that was made in 1957 at the Fender Factory.
This example doesn’t have gold hardware so we can’t call it a “Mary Kaye” model, which was basically this same guitar but fitted with gold hardware, even though in the original promotional picture of Mary nobody could tell if the hardware was nickel or gold (black and white photography does let us wonder at times!)
But a particular feature of Mary’s guitar finish can also be seen in this very guitar we’ve today on our Vintage Vault bench: it’s the “Whiteburst”, a name that has been created to describe a particular spraying application technique adopted by Fender between 1954 and 1957, where they would spray a opaque band all around the body edges, exactly in the same way they’d do to spray the dark part of the sunburst, resulting in a nicely contrasting “burst” effect, a.k.a. “whiteburst”.