Museum Will Showcase Leo Fender

Electric guitar pioneer Leo Fender will be the focus of an ambitious exhibition opening in December at the Fullerton Museum Center.

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“Five Decades of Fender: The Sound Heard Around the World” will be curated by Fender historian, musicologist and Fullerton resident Richard Smith, whose book about the late innovator, who has been called the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of the electric guitar, is to be published next year.

Fender, a Fullerton native who died in 1991, is credited with revolutionizing popular music with the guitars he built in his Fullerton factory in the 1950s and ‘60s. Those instruments had a monumental role in innovations in rock, country, blues and R & B.

“Rock ‘n’ roll and popular music today owes a good deal of its origin to those forms of music and that culture that these instruments fueled,” Smith said.

The exhibit, with a late-1940s starting point, will include Fender guitars, blueprints for his creations, historical photographs and footage from the ‘50s and ‘60s of musicians playing Fender instruments, museum center director Joe Felz said.

It also will attempt to show Fender’s influence on culture and how rock ‘n’ roll reflected changes in society at large, Felz said. The exhibition is scheduled to run from Dec. 10 through April 2.