Fender Eric Clapton "Blackie" Stratocaster

I probably listen to more Blues music than any other genre. And Blues Meister Eric Clapton has influenced my guitar playing a ton. So it only seems natural that my only Fender Strat is a model based on the famous "Blackie" that he allegedly assembled from parts. According to Fender:

Of all the legendary guitars Eric Clapton has wielded throughout his long and storied career, perhaps the most famous of them all is his chipped, scratched and cigarette-burned black Fender Stratocaster; better known to the world as “Blackie". While the guitar’s nickname is derived from its obsidian finish, the question of what model year Blackie actually is could best be answered with, “It’s complicated.” Clapton himself has referred to it as a "mongrel" guitar.

As Clapton wrote in the introduction of The Stratocaster Chronicles (2004), "They were so out of fashion you could pick up a perfectly genuine Strat for two hundred or three hundred dollars—even less! So I bought all of them." A similar haul of mid-'50s Strats today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clapton gave one of the guitars to Pete Townshend, one to Steve Winwood and another to George Harrison. He kept the remaining three for himself.

He played all three for a while, but ultimately, he liked the idea of having a black Strat. However, while the black ’56 Strat he bought at Sho-Bud had a good body, he preferred the neck of another one of the guitars. So he decided to take all three guitars to legendary Nashville luthier Ted Newman Jones to assemble his ultimate Strat. “I kept two or three for myself and built this [Blackie] out of those. With pickups from one, scratchplate from another and the neck from another,” Clapton told Christie’s Auction House in 2004. “It is such a personal thing–I almost made this guitar myself–from different components, and I’ve never done that before or since.”

Using the ’56 Strat’s alder body with its black lacquer finish and the one-piece maple neck with its hard “V” shape from a ’57, Jones began piecing together Clapton’s dream mongrel. The pickups were all standard Strat pickups; two were original from the mid-50s, and a third was from 1970. Speaking to Vintage Guitar in 2004, Lee Dickson, who has been Clapton's guitar tech since 1979, said that while the guitarist doesn't use a tremolo bar, he likes vibrato guitars, noting, "We block the vibrato behind the bridge and tighten up the (vibrato) springs, so it stays pretty solid.”

Specifications

• Black color with polyurethane finish
• Maple neck with soft V shape and 9.5" radius
• Solid alder body
• Fender/Gotoh vintage-style tuners
• Maple fingerboard
• 22 vintage style frets
• Dot inlays
• 3 Vintage Noiseless Strat pickups
• Blocked vintage-style synchronized tremolo
• 5-position blade for pickup switching
• 25dB midrange boost
• TBX circuitry,
• Chrome hardware
• Vintage Tweed case included
• 25.5" scale length
• Clapton signature and "Blackie" on headstock