Dave Stewart, founding member of Eurythmics, noted producer, and one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business has joined us as a recipient artist. Dave will be proud possessor of guitar #11, “Raining in My Heart.”
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,” Maria Elena Holly has observed, “so kids growing up the way he had could have a chance to get started.”
Our board of directors includes Maria Elena Holly (Buddy’s widow), Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Peter Frampton, Julian Lloyd Webber (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s cello-playing younger brother), Henry Kaiser, guitar builder Rick Turner, PeterBradley, and myself.
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 artistic visions.
The Foundation will accomplish this two-fold goal through the perfect recreation of Mr. Holly’s 1943 Gibson guitar, each of which will bear one original fret from Mr. Holly’s guitar, and by lending those recreations to artists like Dave Stewart 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 charitable organizations chosen by the recipient artist. Artists will receive the guitars for a two-year term, renewable in perpetuity at the option of the Foundation’s Board of Directors.
Visit the Buddy Holly Guitar Foundation here for more info, with thanks to them for the following photographs.
