OffsetGuitars.com

truth!  The big ass 70's headstocks are sexy as hell...

Most people don't know this fact:
Bigsby also copped the 6 inline tuner/headstock look from the Croatian tamburica folk instruments, which Leo Fender modified & which is now a patended Fender trademark.

http://www.hr/darko/etf/et12.html

It is not widely known that Leo Fender, a famous builder of rock guitars (Fender Stratocaster), used the shape of a Croatian tamburitza head (more precisely, of the so called "brac" or "bas-prim", see below) for his characteristic guitar head. This was a result of Leo's acquaintance with a Croatian room-mate in his student days, who was a tamburitza player. Information by Nenad Bach, who mentioned this this story on his CD "I love losers" (...Leo Fender mentioned in an interview for Musician magazine that he was inspired by the headstock of the tamburitza when he designed the Fender Stratocaster...). And every song on the CD is accompanied with the tamburitza play.

I'm also a fan of the big 70s headstock. It's the best.


This Tamburitza looks almost like a Fender acoustic 


and we've got the electric XII headstock also



Pics taken from here http://www.worldfrets.com/tamburitza.html

Cool! This is great info. This is the first I've heard it directly attributed to Leo's own words.

So now we know...

the book, "great american guitars, " also has another quote about the tamburitza. I have known this for a long time now since, well, i am Croatian. I brag to all my friends how great it is to have the fender headstock come from your country.

i heard leo say that he got inspration from a back of a 50s cadillac blinker fin



that also might explain why they used auto style paint color too

Except that it would have been an earlier model year than those, I think. Numerous accounts say that Leo actually borrowed the Bigsby guitar at one point, early on. I guess we'll never know. The Czech thing is plausible, but it also could be something they dug up years later because they were always looking for a better rationale. Bigsby's body looked like an LP. I think both Fender and Bigsby were great innovators. As with any invention, there's always going to be cross pollenation and spontaneous leaps forward.

This is supposedly Ted McCarty's (Gibson) pickup winder made by Paul Bigsby. Follow this link. There are some really great handwritten notes that Bigsby made. It also shows the rather unlikely looking Merle Travis holding his now famous guitar. He looks like John Lithgow as Jed Clampett, talking to Fred Ward. When you realize that all men wore suits back then, Travis must have looked like he was in a "cowboy get-up".