Glen Campbell learned guitar on a five-dollar Sears instrument in rural Arkansas
Glen Campbell grew up on a cotton farm without electricity, the seventh son among twelve children, playing a five-dollar guitar from Sears. He was on local radio by six. Years later he was a top Los Angeles session player, then a star in his own right, winning four Grammys in 1967 and selling more than 45 million records.
Campbell was born on 22 April 1936 in Billstown, a speck of a place close to the Arkansas town of Delight. His father was a sharecropper, and the family scraped by growing cotton, corn, watermelons and potatoes. They attended the Church of Christ, and as a child Glen nearly drowned. His father gave him the guitar at four and an uncle known as Boo taught him the basics. In a family where everyone sang and played, he was performing on radio by six.
He never had formal lessons, practising between shifts in the fields and learning from records. He revered the Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, calling him the most awesome player he had ever heard. At 14 he left school in tenth grade to work in Houston with his brothers, installing insulation and pumping petrol, but soon drifted toward fairs, church picnics, radio spots and nightclub gigs.
In Los Angeles he became a sought-after studio guitarist, part of the loose group of players later nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. Going solo, he placed 80 songs on the Billboard country, pop or adult contemporary charts, 29 of them in the top ten and nine at number one. His first hit came in 1965, and songs such as Wichita Lineman and Rhinestone Cowboy became standards. In 1967 Gentle on My Mind won him two country Grammys and By the Time I Get to Phoenix two in pop.
Television and film widened his reach. He hosted The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on CBS from 1969 to 1972 and earned a Golden Globe nomination for his supporting role in True Grit in 1969. The Country Music Association named him Entertainer of the Year for 1968, and both major country bodies honoured him as male vocalist. Across five decades he released 64 albums, and in 2012 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He died on 8 August 2017.
Source: Glen Campbell
