Retired musician Ray Nelson was never a rock star. In fact, he didn’t even play the guitar professionally. Yet that hasn’t stopped the veteran tenor sax player from launching a fret-focused charitable organization that not only gives kids a strong musical foundation—in an era when public school arts programs are threatened by funding cuts—but also provides the beginning instrument with which to build upon that education.
Nelson’s home-grown Guitars Not Guns Music Program celebrated its fifth anniversary recently and continues to steadily expand. The Palm Beach County city of Lake Worth, Florida, recently proclaimed October 21 as Guitars Not Guns Day in the community, holding a benefit concert at a local club and giving each of the city’s first 10 Guitars Not Guns-sponsored students a guitar. In conjunction with partners the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and longtime sponsors the Gibson Foundation, Guitars Not Guns will soon be offering guitars and lessons to kids in New Orleans, after being delayed by the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Planning for future chapters in Biloxi, Mississippi and Iowa is already underway.
“When we start the classes we give them the guitars upfront to practice on—we don’t tell 'em they get to keep the guitars,” Ray explains. “We just say this is yours to use until you finish the class.” Staffed by volunteer teachers that range from amateurs and high school students to professional musicians and even law enforcement personnel, each beginning eight-week Guitars Not Guns class consists of eight to 12 students, aged eight to 18, with no potential student turned away because of financial hardship. Guitars Not Guns also provides its students with original lesson materials because, Nelson says, “The beginner books I picked up at the music stores scared me. So we made up our own book, which we distribute nationwide.”
After the initial course, students hold a jam session and are presented with a certificate. “It empowers those children after eight weeks,” Nelson notes. “Then we get them to come back for level two, where we get into bar chords and a little more stuff. In California, where the program has been the longest, we’ve had some kids coming back over three years because they bond with the other kids. They come back just to hang out and jam.”
“Our graduations are a big affair,” Ray says proudly. “We’ve had mayors come to speak to these kids. It’s a family event, too. We encourage families to stay in the classroom and when the kids take the guitars home, it becomes a family affair.”
Nelson worked for over 30 years as a professional musician, gigs that ranged from steady hotel jobs to the “urban cowboy” country outfit Ray Nelson & Country Fusion he launched when he relocated from St. Louis to San Jose, California in the mid-'70s. Upon retiring, Ray and his wife adopted four foster teen-aged children, “To keep me busy,” he jokes.
During that legal process, Nelson discovered that older foster children typically have a much rougher time than younger ones, moving more frequently from one foster home to another. When his own foster kids arrived, he recalls all they had with them were small plastic bags containing a few clothes. “I thought that sucked,” Ray grouses in recollection. “Being a musician, the first thing I thought was I’ll go out and try to find some guitars to give to them.”
So Nelson began gathering unused and neglected instruments from his friends and acquaintances in San Jose, not only for his own foster children, but others he knew of locally as well. Word of Ray’s musical largesse soon spread throughout the community and he quickly found himself informally securing and gifting guitars nearly fulltime.
“When I gave a guitar to the first kid and saw the look on their face, I was hooked,” Ray recalls. When those donating guitars began inquiring about tax issues, Nelson realized he needed to formalize his efforts, researched the issue at a local library and, with some volunteer legal help, formalized his fledgling efforts as a federally recognized non-profit organization. “The rest, as they say is history,” Nelson says. “We’re now in several states, and Canada just had their first graduation.” He predicts a Guitars Not Guns program in all 50 states within five years.
Now relocated to a suburb outside Atlanta, Ray helps publicize the program with a pair of unusual, home-built vehicles. Nelson built his Guitarcycle in 1981 during his urban cowboy days. Built on a Harley frame with a fiberglass body that roughly resembles a Gibson Explorer, the Guitarcycle first gained fame—and a spot in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!—when Ray drove it coast-to-coast and back.
More recently Nelson took a 1968 Ford Ranch Wagon a friend had given him, stripped off its body and used sheet metal to forge the Acousti-Car, an acoustic guitar-shaped vehicle emblazoned with Guitars Not Guns' web address. The vehicles turn heads and draw media attention wherever it appears, helping spread the Guitars Not Guns mission in the bargain.
Ray dreams of eventually having Guitars Not Guns classes in each of the over 3,000 Boys and Girls Clubs nationwide. But he realizes it’s a daunting challenge: “If we put 10 guitars in each class, that’s 30,000 guitars we’d need every eight weeks. That’s mind-boggling, but it’s gonna happen eventually.”
He also wants it to be a mission that long outlives him. “I relate to it like this,” he explains, If you build a railroad, once that railroad is built you can send freight down that railroad as fast and as long as you can. I have built this railroad because of having the books, lessons and guitars available. All I have to do is ship ‘em down the line to the people and put ‘em out there. The faster I can do that the better things are gonna be.”