Fender has welcomed 21st-century blues guitar phenom Christone “Kingfish” Ingram down to its Corona, California factory for a refresh of his signature Telecaster Deluxe, giving it a new paint job they’re calling Delta Day.
As Kingfish explains in the demo video, a three song set live and direct – literally – from the factory floor, the new look is a twist on Daphne Blue, with a white pickguard because that’s the kind of cool, fresh vibe we’re going for here. It's a brighter version of Kingfish's first model, the deep purple Mississippi Midnight.
That means we have a solid alder body, a bolt-on roasted maple neck topped with a slab rosewood fingerboard, with dot inlays, a 12” radius.
A pair of custom-wound Kingfish pickups occupy the neck and bridge positions, with a three-way pickup selector, plus volume and tone controls serving each pickup. The neck humbucker has an Alnico V bar magnet design and a DCR reading of 6K. The bridge pickup is Alnico III, DCR reading 8.75K (you can actually buy these Kingfish humbuckers separately from the Fender pickup shop). And the bridge is an adjusto-matic TOM-style design.
Yes, this is Fender applying some Gibson logic to the first mass-produced electric guitar – a move that was necessary in the early 1970s as the big beasts of rock migrated to humbucking pastures to graze upon the high-gain, maximum volume pastures under the shadow of tube amp stacks from Marshall and Hiwatt.
Thus the Telecaster Deluxe was quite different to the O.G. Blackguard models of the early 1950s. And as Kingfish notes, it is quite different to the Squier Affinity Telecaster that he made his bones on.
He didn’t quite get that Squier guitar at first; he admits he wasn’t wholly sold on the Telecaster – at least it took a while for it to reveal its charms.
“My first Telecaster was a red Squier Affinity Tele. At first I didn’t get the whole Telecaster movement because I felt like they were too twangy,” says Kingfish. “But then some of my favourite Telecaster players out there like Freddie Stone, from Sly And The Family Stone, Prince, Keith Richards, Albert Collins, and of course all of the country players as well, like Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan. That kind of turned me onto the sound, when I started to dig deep into the blues.”
Ironically, it was a player playing a Tele copy who really lit the fire – a certain Purple One, playing his H.S. Anderson T-style with the animal print pickguard.
“When I found out how funky these things can get, with the twang and everything, that made me get into it,” says Kingfish.
Back to the Kingfish Delta Day Telecaster Deluxe: we have questions. In the demo video, Kingfish refers to it as Delta Day, a new paint job based on Daphne Blue. On the Fender website – and on retailers’ sites – it’s listed as Daphne Blue. Guess we’ll need to compare the finishes side by side, and maybe throw in a Sonic Blue Fender for maximum confusion.
Whatever. It looks the bee’s knees, and it’ll be as good an excuse as any to get our hands around that super-comfy V-profile neck on these Kingfish signature guitars.
Priced £2,599/$2,249, the Kingfish Delta Day Telecaster Deluxe is available now. And it ships with a deluxe moulded guitar case. See Fender for more details.
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