John Shults is used to the hunt. The Birmingham-based vintage guitar dealer and appraiser travels the world to find rare and unique instruments. But sometimes the hunt can turn into something bigger – a mystery to be solved.
For Shults, it started when he came face-to-screen with what he thought had the potential to be a one-of-a-kind six string.
“I was blown away when I first saw it,” Shults said of the moment a picture of the guitar in question hit his inbox.
It was a 1960 Fender Jazzmaster.
As the owner of True Vintage Guitar and a dealer with 16 years of experience specializing in Fender and Gibson instruments made in the 1950s and ‘60s, Shults knew that year of Jazzmaster very well. Well enough to understand that what he was looking at wasn’t the norm.
According to Shults, back then, Fender made their guitars in a standard color. However, buyers could pay a little extra and get the instrument in any color they wanted. Before 1961, the company had no official color chart, so choosing a hue would have virtually been a free-for-all for customers in 1960.
The guitar, shown in the image, was a striking pastel purple, potentially a one-of-one original Fender Jazzmaster.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is probably not a real factory custom color. But on the off chance that it is, this could be a previously unknown custom color that no one's ever seen before,’” Shults said.
Shults responded to the email, telling the sender his hypothesis.
“I said, ‘I’ll need to see some more pictures, because I've only got one picture here,’” he explained.
He didn’t get a response. Even after following up again and again, he didn’t hear back.
“It never set right with me,” Shults said. “I downloaded that picture to my phone, and every couple of months, I'd pull that picture out and I'd stare at it, and I'd notice new things about it. I'd look at how the clear coat had faded in certain areas and turned amber. I just knew deep down that this was a real factory original one-off custom color from Fender from 1960 of which no one had ever seen.”
Every couple of months, Shults would check in with the sender of the image, emailing him and attempting to get him to talk.
“I told him, ‘I don't have to buy the guitar,’” Shults said. “‘You don’t have to let me appraise it or anything. I just want to understand it. I just want to be in the same room with this guitar. I've got so many questions about it that I have to answer.’”
Eventually, he couldn't let it go and, one night, went on an internet deep dive, trying to find the family of the owner of the guitar. Through a text chain, and after days of being left without a response, he eventually came in contact with the actual owner of the intriguingly lilac 1960 Fender Jazzmaster.
“I got a call back from him, and he said, ‘How do you have a picture of my guitar leaning up against the wall in the kitchen?’” Shults said. “And I told him that a friend of the family had emailed me that picture a couple of years ago and I’d been looking for him, because I thought that he may not know that he’s sitting on a very special, very valuable vintage guitar.”
With that, the two set up a meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Shults was soon on a flight, at the guitar owner’s door, and about to unshroud a now three years-long mystery.
“We looked at a couple of things that were making it look real,” he said. “In order to really know if this is a factory original guitar, we have to remove the pick guard to see what's going on underneath. So I very carefully detuned the strings, and I took the screws out of the pick guard that were holding it to the body, and I pulled it up around the pickups, flipped it over.”
There, in the innards of this Jazzmaster, certain tells had been hidden away for decades, like the little piece of masking tape marked with “Violet JM,” a four digit code or the small nail holes in the wood of the guitar body from the curing process.
“I gasped, audibly gasped when I saw it,” Shults said.
This was, in fact, a factory original custom color Fender Jazzmaster.
“We've not been able to find one other example of a special custom color Fender quite like it,” Shults explained. “It's one of the most special guitars that I've ever been privileged to find and be in the same room with and be the owner of for a short time.”
According to Shults, there are still plenty of features, colors, and other six-stringed oddities and rarities waiting to be discovered.
“So if you have an old guitar in your closet, maybe you found it in a storage unit, or maybe you've inherited it from a family member, you might want to reach out and send some pictures,” he said. “I'd be happy to have a look at it for you … It might be that the guitar leaning up against the wall in your kitchen is a one-off custom color Fender Jazzmaster or maybe something more common. But either way, it's a special guitar.”
