It was a '58 model of Fender's first electric solid-body guitar— and this was around 1970 or '71. The precursor of the legendary Telecaster had a white ash body with a white pickguard, a tiny coffee stain on the case but no wear on the guitar; the lacquer was still on the neck.

The guy who'd bought the Fender had taken a couple of lessons, quit because it hurt and traded the thing in at the music store for a piano or organ for his wife. When the kid's dad took the music store owner for an undetermined sum at the pool table one night, he came home and told the boy, "I got a guitar for you that you're going to like."

But, the father said, you have to buy it from me for $200. That is a lot when you're 12 or 13 years old and making $30 a month throwing newspapers for the Vancouver Sun.

The kid was already playing a lot, mostly just fooling around. Can I play it with my friends, he asked?

The father said, no, if you don't pay it off, I've got to keep it in good shape so I can sell it. But you can play it for 20 minutes or so on Sundays.

The kid everybody called Redd fell asleep with that guitar on his bed every night for years, waking up and playing it first thing in the morning, playing it when there was a minute's practice time to snatch, when he was supposed to be in school, when one of his parents' records was on and he listened and tried to cop licks.

Redd Volkaert, now 47 (born Justin Volkaert on March 6, 1958, the same year as the guitar, same birthday as Bob Wills), still has that guitar — which he paid off in about six months. And he'll never sell it, not ever, because something in that guitar brought out a talent in him that made him what he is today: a very busy if not filthy rich guitar player possessed of genius.

Is he, in fact, the best guitar player in town? A crazy and unprovable claim.

So. OK. Yes, Redd Volkaert is the best guitar player in Austin, even if you've never heard of him.

Within the local music community, there is a cult of Redd. Players on their way to their own gigs will stop into Volkaert's regular Saturday afternoon sessions at the Continental Club — where the band plays for tips — to get a cold beer and a free guitar lesson. He shares stages with players who've worked for Asleep at the Wheel and Bob Dylan. He was for six or seven years Merle Haggard's lead player.

Online message groups for Telecaster geeks post messages with things like "In Redd we trust" in the subject line. He's featured in several recent issues of Vintage Guitar magazine. He plays Telecasters he builds himself from parts he gets off eBay — even the Fender decals that go on the headstock. The '58 Esquire is too valuable to gig with, so he keeps it in storage.

There he is on the Continental stage, with his beard and tattooed forearms the size of Virginia hams, making his guitar do things that have other players shaking their heads, thinking, should I practice more or just quit?

Some guitarists can play really, really fast but don't have anything to say. Some use volume to cover up a lack of technique. Volkaert seldom floors it. When he does, you can practically feel the G forces pushing on you. And his solos are funny; in the middle of an amazing run he'll throw in a little levity — the wrong note in exactly the right place.

He plays old-time country with a little swing — George Jones and Floyd Tillman and the like, and his own songs — mostly in a trio setting that changes as it moves around town five or six nights. Jovita's, Ego's, the Continental Club, Threadgill's (north and south), Central Market (ditto). His help includes steel and dobro player Cindy Cashdollar, winner of five Grammy awards who's worked with Asleep at the Wheel, Bob Dylan and many more.

On Sunday nights he's at the Continental with Heybale, Austin's country dance group that includes alums from Junior Brown, Brian Setzer and Johnny Cash. His extensive discography includes solo albums and sessions with dozens of other artists, including Haggard, local fixture Dale Watson and sometimes-sideman Billy Dee.

At risk of stating the thunderously obvious — twice — a pair of observations: The first is that life is not fair. Great talent does not necessarily mean a big contract with a major label, one's own private plane, cavorting with supermodels, the requisite descent into drugs, booze and mouth-foaming madness followed by a redemptive "Behind the Music" segment. No matter how good you are or ever hope to be, you are not likely to be widely known if you aren't young, aren't skinny, aren't pretty.

The second is that Austin is blessed with a staggering amount of musical talent. Imagine that concentration of talent has whirled into a sphere, like the Earth. On the surface, a handful of the young and skinny and pretty ones bask in the light and the cool of wide acclaim. Below the surface, hundreds more — often no less talented, sometimes more — toil in the dark, hot, sulfurous and smoky (though not for much longer, as the smoking ban looms Sept. 1) underground.

They can curse the Fates for making them unyoung, unskinny, unpretty, for not rewarding them commensurate to their talents.

Or they can be like Redd Volkaert. They can be glad they have a gig. They can be happy to be a working musician.

The kid took lessons for a while. Then his teacher put a piece of music in front of him and told him to play something — it might have been "Can-Can." Redd played "Can-Can." The teacher told him the music he was looking at wasn't "Can-Can."

Busted. The kid was just watching the teacher's fingers, playing by ear. The teacher called Redd's dad and told him to save his money. It was just easier for the kid to play those Deep Purple records over and over, hunting and pecking until he got close to what Ritchie Blackmore was doing.

Sometimes when he was supposed to be in school he was hanging out at the music store, playing guitars, running across the street to the little diner, the Roundup Cafe, to hear new tunes on the jukebox, go back to the music store to hash out the song he'd just heard.

After cutting his teeth in British Columbia clubs — all of them — he moved to Alberta at 17 to play, and Volkaert hasn't really had a job outside of music since. If he has to drive a backhoe or rebuild carburetors, no big deal. But he says:

"I'm the luckiest SOB in the world because I get to play guitar and people pay me for it."

Volkaert hung around California for a few years, then headed to Nashville, where he did live gigs, studio work and hooked up with Don Kelley's band, known for being a kind of finishing school for Nashville's hottest session musicians.

"I've had the best guitar players in this town through that band," Kelley says. "If I had to take my pick out of all of them, it'd be Redd for the style and the taste and the tone. It has to go to Redd. And my other guitar players would have to agree. He got his guitar out and scared everybody to death. Nobody has the approach to the Fender Telecaster like Redd Volkaert."

Volkaert had jammed with members of Haggard's band, the Strangers, and one day in 1997 he answered the phone and was offered a dream gig: playing guitar with Merle. Deeply influenced by the late Roy Nichols, Haggard's legendary picker from the classic incarnation of the Strangers, Volkaert didn't hesitate for long.

Then he called his mother and said, "Guess who I got a gig with?"

"Merle Haggard."

"Yup."

As he recalls this conversation over enchiladas at El Sol y La Luna, the smile on Redd Volkaert's face is so broad and vivid you'd think the call happened this morning.

"It's so unreal the way it's worked out," he says.

Playing so much, and with so many different people, made Volkaert almost inhumanly versatile, but he was never a bandleader, never stepped into the light. The joy of the music is its own reward for some players, and as long as they're busy and eating, that's enough. Rolling Stone can put somebody else on the cover.

"He was Haggard's guitar player for years. If you're a Tele player, can you achieve more success than that?" asks Austin guitar teacher and Telecaster freak Tony Redman. "That's the top of the heap, man."

As there is a cult of Redd, there's a Tele cult. Revered for its twang, it's the workhorse instrument for everybody from Bruce Springsteen to Vince Gill.

"It's hard to use," Volkaert says, "but once you get a handle on it you can get a lot more out of it."

Indeed, listening to Volkaert, it's hard to imagine all that sound is coming out of a guitar with two pickups and no tremolo bar. (Volkaert can get a slight vibrato effect by pressing the body of the guitar toward his torso and the back of the neck out, those hams looking like they're about to snap the Tele in two.)

The variations that Volkaert gets within those limitations means that no matter what setting he's playing in, Redd Volkaert's music is almost always accompanied by the sound of jaws scraping barroom floors. The guy makes the Telecaster a bottomless bag of tricks. What he does to "Sleepwalk" might change your life.

"The way a true musician plays is a direct reflection of their personality," says Austin guitar teacher and Telecaster fanatic Tony Redman. "Redd is a virtuoso, but he's genuinely humble and has a great sense of humor and all that comes through when he's playing. You can hear a virtuoso and it's exciting, and you think, 'OK, that was great.' But when you hear Redd you hear his personality with the technique and the command of the instrument. Without even knowing it, he has become a Telecaster guru."

Because of Volkaert's work with Haggard and others, not to mention chronic Austin-Nashville cross-pollination, people here knew who he was when he moved to town five years ago.

Of course it had to be Austin, long a beacon for people a little outside the mainstream, eccentrics. It's the only right place for countless wrong notes, whom we welcome and nurture.

Once here, Volkaert helped revive Heybale, which had started in Nashville, and when the Sunday night gig didn't seem to be drawing crowds, Continental owner Steve Wertheimer encouraged the band to keep at it until it caught on. Now there are two acceptable places to be late on a Sunday — home or at the Continental Club.

"That's really my favorite thing to do on a Sunday night in Austin," says Chip Taylor, famously the author of "Wild Thing" and about six billion other hits, who with Carrie Rodriguez give a shout-out in their song "Dirty Little Texas Story," from the album "The Trouble With Humans":

Let's go hear ol' Redd and Earl Poole Ball

Play a sad one maybe.

"Watch him do those flashy licks that no other human being could ever do," Taylor said. "And some people have flash and nothing to back it up. He's got flash and heart. You walk in there and you watch a master."

Suppose people say things like this about you. Would you make the mistake of believing them? Not likely if you spent your career as a sideman, which tends to inculcate a certain modesty. You might be the world's most brilliant mechanic, but you're working on somebody else's car.

But what if the gigs got a little scarce, and you left Haggard's band, and you were forced by default into the light, to be a bandleader for the very first time?

Which is what happened to Redd Volkaert. In his mid-40s, he found himself the center of attention. Being a utility player for so long made him modest and even-handed — nobody playing with Volkaert has to fight for more solo space; he wants to hear what other players have to say in the musical conversation.

"He makes you reach way down inside and come up with stuff you'd never come up with without him," says steel player Cashdollar. "He just encourages you to have fun. Even before I ever knew him, I thought he was one of the reasons people are so lucky to live in Austin."

The funny thing is, despite a pervasive bass voice that sounds as if it's fresh from the rock quarry, he hates singing and half-jokes that the only real upside to singing is calling more instrumental solos for his bandmates and ("Take it, Redd!") himself.

Guitar teacher Redman prefers to see Volkaert in a trio setting for that very reason.

"Then you get to hear him all the more," Redman says. "And he does his pedal steel imitations when there's no steel player around. He's got all the bases covered. Guys on the radio have chops all day long and can burn, but there's no soul there. Redd can burn, but you don't want to put it to the floor all the time. You want to say something, build it up and have some dynamics."

Spin through Volkaert's "No Stranger to a Tele" (2001, Hightone Records) or any of his other CDs, and it becomes clear that as a songwriter Volkaert's default is Western swing. But as a player? This from Cashdollar: "He can play shred metal, too."

This, too, somewhat improbably, is true. In fact, Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple was a huge influence on Volkaert. He remembers being up front for a Purple show with his brother (who now plays drums in a cruise-line Beatles cover band, but that's another story), touching Blackmore's Stratocaster, actually grabbing the neck and not letting go.

Just this year, Volkaert was invited to play on a Deep Purple 40th anniversary tribute album.

It is unreal how it's all worked out. He's asked to contribute a track to one of his heroes.

Wouldn't you say that's success? And he's able to make his living around town, although he's on the road some, too. And he'll have a new CD out soon, and an instructional video perhaps, and he and Cashdollar are putting a new band together, a mix of Western swing, country and jazz called the High-Flyers.

If you want job security, you don't try to make a living with a guitar in your hands, as hundreds in this town do. But if you can do that, you count yourself lucky and it makes you humble because — not despite — the fact that you're playing Tuesday night south of the river, in a little bar called Ego's concealed by a parking garage, to the handful of people who really get it. You take their applause at the end of another tune loaded with stunning guitar gymnastics and you turn it around.

You say, "No, thank you. Thank you."

pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603