If ever a guitar typified the glorious excesses of the 1950s, the White Falcon would be that guitar. To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, the Falcon was a “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” Or, according to the Gretsch literature of the day, it was simply “the most beautiful guitar in the world.”

Of course, superlatives are costly, and so was the Falcon. To this day, Falcons are highly prized — and pricey.

But for all the things the 6136 White Falcon was, it was not necessarily intended to be a production model at all. It was originally a trade show guitar, a “dream machine” Gretsch put together to show off a little. As the orders came rushing in after its introduction at the 1954 music trade shows, the Falcon was rushed into production.

The story really begins years earlier with Gretsch master salesman and player Jimmy Webster and time he spent in World War II playing an all-white Harmony. Pictures of him playing that guitar turned up in an armed forces newsletter titled The White Falcon, and lodged themselves in Webster’s memory.

After the war, Webster was at the Gretsch factory, wandering the floor and looking for ideas. The Falcon’s outrageous blend of looks and features came from all across the factory and were blended together with Webster’s own penchant for extras and extravagance.

From the drum side, Webster picked up gold sparkle drum material. From the banjo side, he saw the rhinestones and ornamentation that bejeweled the high-end banjos. He put it all together with that long-remembered glossy white finish and name and came up with the White Falcon.

From its debut in ‘54, the Falcon featured gleaming white paint and gold sparkle trim, 24-karat gold-plated metal parts, ebony and real mother of pearl, all working together to dazzle players and dreamers alike. The guitar had three-layer white, gold and black binding, bird-themed engravings on the neck markers, a special winged headstock and “Cadillac G” tailpiece, so named becauce the “V” at the end was reminiscent of a Cadillac logo, back when Cadillac was “The Standard of the World” — and the first GM division with a modern V-8 engine, too.

All the Falcon’s hardware was top-shelf, right down to the Grover Imperial tuners. It was also the only spruce-topped Gretsch — except for the occasional Country Club — and a big bird, coming in at 17 inches wide and almost three inches deep.

In the 60s, the White Falcon switched to a twin-cutaway body, and continuously had more gadgets thrown at it. By the late ‘60s there were so many knobs and switches stuck on the White Falcon it took an electrical engineer rather than a guitar player to actually use one.

Much like the Cadillacs they took styling cues from and that other icon of the ‘50s, Elvis, the Falcons entered the ‘70s as a bloated parody of the cool they had once embodied.

During the ‘70s, Baldwin began taking some of the sillier “features” off Falcons. Whether this was a good idea that actually came from the Baldwin offices or just another example of cost-cutting is open to debate, but Falcon’s became increasingly stripped down and uncluttered. A single cutaway Falcon even returned beginning in 1974, but with a different model number. The classic 6136 White Falcon had came to an end, at least until the modern era.

During the modern era, the Falcon was revived both in classic single and double cutaway configurations, and some new, non-white, Falcons joined the family, too.

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