Our Mission
"Well all right let people know
About the dreams and wishes you wish"
Near the end of his far too short life, Buddy Holly announced plans to build a recording studio in his home town of Lubbock, Texas. "Buddy wanted to build a studio in Lubbock," his widow Maria Elena Holly has observed, "so kids growing up the way he had could have a chance to get started." Tragedy intervened on "the Day the Music Died" on February 3, 1959 when Mr. Holly and his dream perished.
The mission of The Buddy Holly Guitar Foundation is both to "let people know about this dream" and to help to make it a reality by raising funds for non-profit organizations that will help "kids growing up" in challenging circumstances "have a chance to get started" in expressing their own musical visions.
The Foundation will accomplish this two-fold goal through the perfect recreation of one of Mr. Holly's guitars and by lending those recreations to artists whom the Foundation's Board of Directors deem exemplary of Mr. Holly's artist vision. The Foundation will require that the recipient artists use the instruments in a manner consistent with Mr. Holly's "dreams and wishes" and for the purpose of raising funds for designated charitable organizations. Artists will receive the guitars for a two-year term, renewable at the option of the Foundation's Board of Directors.
The guitar that the foundation will recreate is Mr. Holly's 1943 Gibson J-45 on which he wrote many of his most popular and moving songs. The guitar bears a leather cover that Mr. Holly crafted and tooled with decorations and titles of some of his early hit songs. The recreations will include replicas of the cover. Founding Board of Directors member Rick Turner is the only living luthier who has an intimate knowledge of the original guitar. Mr. Turner did the restoration work on Mr. Holly's Gibson J-45 when actor Gary Busey, who starred in the film The Buddy Holly Story, purchased it in 1990. Mr. Turner also was the recipient of a unique gift from Mr. Busey. When, Mr. Turner replaced the frets on Mr. Holly's guitar, Mr. Busey gave the originals to him. As a result, each of the recreations, which Mr. Turner and his colleagues at Renaissance Guitars will build, will be accompanied by a fret from the original guitar. In addition to adding authenticity and a bit of the Buddy Holly legacy to each guitar, this plan limits production to a total of eighteen instruments.
The Foundation also plans to use this project to honor some of music history's unsung women heroes. Founding Board of Directors member John Thomas is at work on a book about Gibson's WWII era guitars: Banner Gibsons: The Story of the Flattop Guitars of 1942-45 and the Extraordinary Women (and a Few Men) Who Built Them, Michigan State University Press (forthcoming, 2010). As the title suggests, the Gibson war-time workforce was almost entire female. The book will have as its centerpiece a set of oral histories of a dozen women who appeared in Gibson's 1944 workforce photograph. The Foundation will host a reception for these women, one of whom was Gibson sole guitar inspector during the time that the company built Mr. Holly's J-45. At the reception, the Foundation will present the first recreation to her for her approval.
Once approved, that instrument and the succeeding seventeen will begin a perpetual journey to fulfill Buddy Holly's vision.
"Well all right, let people know about the dreams and wishes you wish."
