So much about scoring big wins in the music industry has to do with being in the right place at the right time, and that’s also true of acquiring gear. Finding a guitar that plays good, sounds good, and is within one’s budget can be like finding a needle in a haystack. And in the late 1970s, Vince Gill just happened to step right onto that fateful silver needle by pure luck when he acquired what he would later call one of his all-time favorite guitars.
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Gill was browsing at Dell City Music in Oklahoma City around the same time that Larry Briggs, a vintage guitar dealer from Tulsa, came by to do a trade with Dell City owner Bob Woods. The two men were swapping around twenty guitars, and one of the axes Woods ended up with was a white 1953 Telecaster. “I saw the deal go down, and Larry left, and I said, ‘Hey, Bob. You just took in that old Telecaster. You interested in selling that?” Gill recalled in a 2026 interview with Fender.
Woods agreed and offered it to Gill for $450, which was a hasty and perhaps lowball offer for Woods to make—but a dream come true for Gill. The young musician obviously agreed, and that Telecaster became the guitar that helped Gill establish his career. Gill and Woods kept up over the years, and during each visit, Woods said the same thing about that infamous Tele.
Vince Gill and Bob Woods’ Running Joke About the 1953 Telecaster
Vince Gill told Fender that every time he would visit Bob Woods at Dell City Music, Woods would razz Gill, saying, “God dang you. You got to me on that Telecaster.” Gill continued, “I said, ‘I did not. I got it for a couple hundred bucks cheaper than it might have been worth. Hell, that guitar helped make me famous. It’s been as much a part of my career as my voice.”
In a lot of ways, Gill himself is like a Telecaster. Both are easily transferable across rock ‘n’ roll, country, bluegrass, and R&B. Gill and his guitar are both workhorses and dependable staples of the music industry. And both are known for having a higher register that still manages to be smooth and pleasing to the ear. Gill cited Roy Nichols as a significant influence in that regard, revealing the trick Nichols gave Gill for dialing in his tone.
“I got a great tip from Roy Nichols,” Gill said. “He told me one time, he says, ‘If you want to really know the great secret, a really good trick about a Telecaster, take the tone pot and just roll it back until that really, really brittle top end goes away. Then, you can brighten it on your amp a little bit more. The treble frequencies on an amp are much lower. So, you roll that back a little bit, you can brighten it. It was a magical tip, and it’s a big part of the reason that this guitar sounds the way it does.”
Photo by Kevin Winter/ACMA/Getty Images for ACMA
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