The Christian Tele… “Bless your heart!”

Down South they like to say “Bless your heart…” a lot. Often it is intended as a euphemism; a soft-speak expression offered in response to someone who’s a little “thick”, or who maybe spoke in haste or in ignorance about something. Rather than just stating the obvious: “Man, are you stupid…”, in such cases it is considered keeping with traditional Southern manners to just say, “Bless your heart…”, politely acknowledging someone else’s verbal indiscretion without actually calling attention to it, sparing them personal or public embarrassment. There is a lot to be said for “Southern manners”, and doing it this way works pretty well as long as the assumption of ignorance holds true. Ahem…

But the heck with that! Check out this parts-caster T-Style, built for a customer who wanted it tricked out with a very unique neck pickup…

The order was to install a Lollar Charlie Christian pickup in the neck position, and then assemble and setup the guitar to the player’s personal tastes. A traditional Tele pickguard was retooled to accommodate the new pup. The slideshow presents the repair process from start to finish.

Charlie Christian pickups are available directly from Lollar Pickups.

Installing the Christian is a great appointment for any T-style instrument. It does require modding the neck pickup cavity in most cases. Lollar Pickups also sells a pre-modified pickguard and harness with the pickup installed if you’re not down for fabricating a new pickguard.

If you do want to take a stab at modding the pickguard yourself, you can also download a free router template with instructions from the Lollar pickups website.

This is a sexy and sonorous upgrade for your own Telecaster or T-Style axe, and well worth the money.

But you could probably tell that already just from the pictures, right? Sure you could. “Bless your heart…”

Adam’s numinous moment…

And everyone said, “Amen!”