Ellen Campbell has spent much of her life introducing people to the sheer pleasure of making music. Currently the owner and guitar instructor of Heartsblood Music in Lexington, Kentucky, Campbell did most of her teaching in the public schools, where she worked as a teacher’s aide for 30 years.

“In the classroom, playing guitar helps to develop fine motor skills,” says Campbell. “When I began as an aide, the principal played guitar, so every Friday I taught the whole school guitar. It was so cool.”

As Campbell got more involved, she realized that many students couldn’t afford instruments of their own. So she set about helping to provide guitars as well as instruction, with some help from a friend. “I played in a bluegrass band at the time, and our mandolin player would do a benefit each year, for whatever charitable cause she felt like,” Campbell recalls. “She did one for me that year and raised about $2,000. I was able to buy guitars for students who weren’t able to afford them, once they proved they would take care of the guitar and would practice. I used some of the money to build a nice carpeted storage space for those instruments.”

Campbell herself learned to play guitar in school—sort of. “When I was 15, they offered guitar in high school,” she says. “I’m left-handed, so when students look at me now, it’s like looking in a mirror. But the teacher didn’t want to fool with me; she wanted me to play right handed. My father never went to school a day in his life and didn’t even know the names of the chords, but he strung my guitar backward [so I could play left-handed] and showed me what he knew. I went back to class and pretended to read tablature, but I was learning by ear, and the teacher never caught on.” Years later, Campbell learned to read tablature from a fellow musician, but she got plenty of hands-on experience in the meantime, “sometimes in a beer joint on Saturday night and in church on Sunday morning.”

Off to a Smart Start
Through her own pursuits as a musician, Campbell discovered Jessica Baron Turner’s SmartStart Guitar method, which starts students off in open-G tuning and allows them to play whole songs with a minimal amount of fretting. “I bought a Taylor guitar,” Campbell explains, “and their newsletter had an article about SmartStart.” She applied for Turner’s Guitars in the Classroom program, which provides training and teaching materials as well as guitars but got turned down the first year. Then Turner wrote to her. “She said, ‘I couldn’t throw your letter away,’ and sent me nine guitars,” Campbell recalls.

Turner had been impressed by Campbell’s explanation of how studying the guitar helps students with everything from fine and large motor skills to social skills and math. She passed Campbell’s letter on to Fender Guitars, at which point, says Campbell, “Someone called and wanted to use it at a board meeting. I didn’t believe it was really someone from Fender, so when they asked what they could do for me, I said I’d like nine guitars, three-quarter sized, with nylon strings so they wouldn’t hurt the kids’ fingers. Two days later, the UPS truck rolled up, and I thought, ‘I should have asked for 30 guitars!’”

Eventually, Campbell was bringing 21 guitars to school every day and seeing all kinds of results, from musical to social to psychological. “I would pair up kids who didn’t get along, and they would figure things out together and get to be friends,” she says. She also found that Turner’s method worked with students from whom others might not have expected so much. “I taught a student who had lost an arm. I rigged up a way that he could hold the pick with his hook. There was another kid, he was a special ed student, but he wound up helping the ‘smart kids’ with guitar.”

“SmartStart is very easy,” Campbell explains, observing that “it gives kids a sense of ‘I can do this.’ I would tell students, ‘You’re doing something that 90 percent of adults can’t do,’ and that makes them feel good. And what a transition when you go to standard tuning! Students who’ve been playing in open tuning with SmartStart just slip right into it.”