Country singer Billy Dean went back to his old school in Florida on Tuesday and gave the school ten guitars.

Billy Dean was playing in his father’s band at eight and sang “My Way” at his graduation from Robert F. Munroe Day School in Gadsden County, Florida, before he left for Nashville and two top-three country hits. On Tuesday he was back in the school’s music room with ten new guitars, and he stayed to teach.

16 September 2026

Billy Dean, grey-haired and in a black T-shirt, sits playing an acoustic guitar in front of a red Munroe Bobcats banner, with a row of new guitars on stands behind him and a boy holding a guitar and smiling at the left of the frame
Billy Dean in the music room at Robert F. Munroe Day School on Tuesday, with the guitars he brought lined up behind him.
Photo: WCTV

Billy Dean, the country singer who grew up in Quincy, Florida, went back to his old school on Tuesday and gave its music programme ten guitars, then sat down in front of the Munroe Bobcats banner with one of them and worked with the students, according to the two Tallahassee stations that were in the room.

Robert F. Munroe Day School is a private school for four-year-olds through to twelfth grade in Gadsden County, founded in 1969, with about ten students to a teacher, and as WTXL’s Tatyana Purifoy noted, it runs on the fees its families pay, so extra support is what lets it add things beyond the classroom. The school already has a Billy Dean Scholarship for its performing arts students, and one of its 2024 recipients, Estrella Rodriguez, was there on Tuesday.

Ten new acoustic guitars on stands on a folding table in front of the red Munroe Bobcats banner, with a violin case on the table and a music-themed rug on the floor
The ten guitars on a table in the music room before they were handed out.
Photo: WCTV

“I hope that we can first of all get more funding for it and that it expands, and not just in music in general for different instruments but also theater as well, because I know that a lot of the students here at Munroe love to participate in theater,” she told WTXL.

The boy who left

Dean was born in Quincy on 2 April 1962, and by the age of eight he was playing in the band his father ran in his spare time, The Country Rocks. He kept playing through his years at Munroe, with his father’s band and with other local musicians, and at his high school graduation he sang Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”. Basketball took him to East Central Community College in Decatur, Mississippi, on a scholarship, and after a year there he left for Nashville. By 1990 he had his first hit, “Only Here for a Little While”, which reached number three on the Billboard country chart, and its follow-up, “Somewhere in My Broken Heart”, did the same. His first three albums went gold, and he sang “In the Garden” with Susan Ashton on the 1995 album “Amazing Grace: A Country Salute to Gospel”, which won the Grammy for the year’s best Southern, country or bluegrass gospel album.

Billy Dean in 1998, dark-haired and in a black suit with an open white shirt, playing an acoustic guitar at a microphone on an outdoor stage
Dean on stage at the Country for Kids concert in Stafford, Virginia, in 1998, eight years after his first hit.
Photo: Jim Williams, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Coming back to Munroe, he told WCTV, was a full-circle moment, and the guitars were him repaying a favour to the next generation.

Tuesday

“Today, being here today, I have no idea. There may be a little Billy Dean or a little Whitney Houston or a little Ella Langley, you know, or a little Morgan Wallen,” he said. “I’ve spotted a couple. I can tell ‘that kid is already hooked’ or ‘that kid is gonna stay with it.’ I can just already tell.”

Students in red and white polo shirts sit in a classroom holding acoustic guitars, one boy in the middle playing, with more guitars on stands in the foreground and a Music Careers display on the wall
Students trying the guitars in the music room on Tuesday.
Photo: WCTV

He told WTXL that the arts are essential to a rounded education. “I think it brings out our humanity. Being a math whiz or a science whiz without humanity, that could be dangerous. I think you have to have the arts to balance all the other academics.”

Billy Dean, grey-haired in a dark T-shirt, talking outside under the covered walkway of the school, with a playing field and students in the background
Dean outside the school after the session.
Photo: WCTV
There may be a little Billy Dean or a little Whitney Houston or a little Ella Langley in here. I’ve spotted a couple.Billy Dean, to WCTV

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Written from the reporting of Tamia Williams for WCTV and Tatyana Purifoy for WTXL, both 15 September 2026, with Dean’s early life from his Wikipedia entry and the school’s own description. WCTV dates the visit to Monday; WTXL’s reporter, who was at the school, says Tuesday. The photographs from Tuesday are frames from WCTV’s report; the 1998 photograph is Jim Williams’s, from Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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