


"It's the same guitar that Marty Stuart plays to this day. It remained his main guitar for a long time." He said, 'I guess we're at the point of no return…' and I said, 'Yeah… we are.' But thankfully, after he tried it out, he loved how it came out. "The morning after, we met for coffee, and I slid that Tele across the table, and Clarence was stunned.

So, when Parsons presented the drastically altered guitar to White, it was something of a shock.
Marty music guitar lessons install#
It was at that point that he handed over his Tele and told me to install it."Īnyone who knows the legend of Clarence White's '56 Tele knows that the Byrds' guitarist loved his curio more than life itself. So, I drew up a design, rounded up parts, and presented that to Clarence. I presented that to Clarence, and boy, he loved it. Settling back with a wry smile, Parsons recalls the B-Bender's breakthrough moment: "So, what I did was I came up with the idea of using the shoulder strap to actuate a level. "He said to me, 'I want a guitar that I can put in the case, and it has everything on it when I pick it up.' See, Clarence didn't want to move his hands out of their normal position while playing, which was the problem in the first place. "Clarence didn't want to play pedal steel," Parsons tells us. Still, it needed several tweaks before settling on the initial configuration that would make the device famous. I sort of had an idea in my mind of how I'd do it, but I was in no position to say if it would actually work."īut work it did, and the Parsons/White B-Bender was born. "After Clarence asked me to make something, I went home and rounded up some old steel guitar components, bicycle cables, and whatever else I could find. He had a feeling it would be useful, but there was no way Parsons could have known that his radical invention would have such staying power.
