Republicans... proudly marching into the 1950's

[Rev. Rye]

How about this. Yeah, man. Now check out Luther Perkins on the Telecaster. The '50s were the greatest.

That's an Esquire, not a Telecaster. Notice the lack of a neck pickup. Granted, the picture quality in this clip is poor enough that a potential neck pickup could have blended into the pickguard, but, having seen what I think was this same guitar in the Ash at the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville in 2014, and knowing that one gear site pointedly states he never used a proper Tele, and a higher quality picture of the same guitar clearly shows no pickup, I feel safe saying it's an Esquire.



That said, there's nothing wrong with the Esquire. Syd Barrett, Jeff Beck, Bruce Springsteen (technically, he had his modded with an added neck pickup), and to a lesser extent Paul McCartney and David Gilmour all used them, and, thanks to that, given the choice between a Telecaster and Esquire, I'd personally pick the Esquire in a heartbeat. Of course, that's just me.

Also, Rockabilly is a bad example of why the 1950s were great (at least from your perspective), not because it's not great (I love it), but because it was treated as a threat to the status quo (or, at least, what the Powers That Be wanted the status quo to be,) in no small part due to the relatively brazen sexuality that was so shocking that Elvis could only be filmed above the waist on the Ed Sullivan Show, and because of its heavy influence from the Black blues performers of the area, to the extent that the thing that led Sam Phillips to sign Elvis was that he sounded a lot blacker than most white singers of the day (and even a few of the black singers, see The Ink Spots, Johnny Mathis, and Nat King Cole,) and if he became famous, it would normalise the very much "other" Black culture.