Jack White never wanted to be like all the other guitar players he knew or saw on the TV, players who gravitated to Fender or Gibson. Maybe it was a sense of teenaged orneriness, a non-conformist zeal that took hold in adolescence, but in the here and now it looks very much like vision.
His circumspection might have denied him the player-friendly features of the Stratocaster but it gave him something more important, a very particular sound – and a very particular look. Imagine the White Stripes but with White playing a Les Paul instead of a red bizarro red Airline with a white pickguard.
One of his most famous guitars, his early-'60s Kay K6533 archtop hollowbody – with that super-cool “cheese grater” single-coil pickup at the neck position – gave him his Seven Nation Army tone.
Speaking to Reverb, White explains how he arrived at his decision, and how he never looked back.
“Maybe late teens, I just had decidedly hated anything to do with Stratocasters, Les Pauls, any of the common instruments that you see everybody use,” he says.
[I] just thought it was just so overused and so indicative of – I don’t know – like, white-boy blues, if you had a Stratocaster, or heavy metal, if you use this kind of guitar, or whatever. I would rather try to find something that didn’t have any connotations already thrown on it, and so I was attracted to the Silvertones and Airlines, and things that you just didn’t see on TV, or on videos.”
Once upon a time, Silvertone guitars were very popular. That’s because they were cheap. They were produced for Sears, and were one of the original catalog guitars. Airline had a similar origin story, and were made by the retail giant Montgomery Ward. Neither had much cultural cachet to speak of. White says an older generation of players couldn’t believe that he would ever want to play one.
“You start talking to older people, it’s like, ‘Oh well, when I was a kid, that’s all anybody had, Silvertones. Nobody had enough money to pay for a real guitar,’” he says.
Thanks to White, Silvertones and Airline guitars are popular again. Indeed, Silvertone guitars are officially back as a brand, and at NAMM 2026 debuted the Silvertone 1446, a semi-hollowbodied electric guitar popularized by the likes of Hubert Sumlin’ and Elvis Costello, but is probably most famous for being the guitar Chris Isaak played in the early days. That Wicked Game tone? That was a Silvertone 1446.
In the 2000s, as the White Stripes got big, Eastwood Guitars bought the Airline name and revived the brand, and they have since been bought by a Chicago-based owner. They’re officially cool. When White started playing Silvertones in the ‘90s he was in a minority of one.
“In Detroit, I never saw anybody use that guitar,” he says. “I never saw anybody on TV, and definitely nobody I saw playing shows or anybody I knew that owned one. So when I was using it, it felt very unique.”
White says it was the making of him. And, now that he’s all grown up, has collaborated with Fender with his signature Triplecaster and Triplesonic signature guitars – not to mention his Pano Verb tube amp and accessories – he can see the appeal of the ubiquitous models. And when he picks one up he finds something different in them.
“It’s just trying to find a uniqueness, a new voice for yourself. I didn’t want to use the same tool that everyone else was using, he says.
“So I’m glad I did that. I’m glad I had that kind of desire to try to carve something out, because then, once you do that, then you can rewind, and you can take one of those more common guitars and get something out of it that I think I wouldn’t have got if I had just come up using that.”
White is not the only one to harbor such sentiments. St. Vincent admitted that she felt ill-disposed to using Stratocasters because there was too much cultural “baggage” around them – though she ultimately changed her mind when Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready lent her his Strat when recording 2024 studio album All Born Screaming.
Chris Buck expressed similar sentiments regarding the Strat – which is what first pushed him towards a fresh canvas in the form of Yamaha's Revstar models.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
