Glen Campbell
Delight
1936 – 2017
From rural Pike County to Hollywood, television, and the top of the country and pop charts, Glen Campbell built one of the most versatile careers in American entertainment. His path began near Delight, Arkansas, in the tiny community of Billstown, where music offered a way out of poverty and eventually carried him around the world.
Campbell was born in 1936 into a large farming family. Life during the Great Depression and its aftermath was hard, and work was part of childhood. The family picked cotton and took seasonal jobs away from home when necessary. Church, however, provided something beyond work. The Campbells attended a Church of Christ congregation where unaccompanied singing filled the services, giving young Glen an early education in melody and harmony.
At four, Campbell received a small mail-order guitar. His uncle Eugene “Boo” Campbell helped him learn the instrument, and the boy practiced constantly. By eight, Glen and his uncle were performing at schools, church events, and local radio programs. Formal schooling held less attraction than music. As a teenager, Campbell left Arkansas for stretches of work and performing in the West and Southwest, gradually turning raw talent into professional skill.
By 1960, he had moved to Los Angeles, where he entered one of the most demanding musical environments in the country. Campbell became a first-call session guitarist and vocalist, working with the loose circle of elite studio musicians later known as the Wrecking Crew. His guitar and voice appeared on recordings by artists across popular music, including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, the Mamas and the Papas, the Monkees, and the Beach Boys. In 1963 alone, his work could be heard on hundreds of recorded songs.
Campbell’s musicianship was so highly regarded that when Brian Wilson stopped touring with the Beach Boys in late 1964, Campbell temporarily took his place on the road. It was a remarkable apprenticeship in the upper levels of the music business, but Campbell still wanted a career under his own name.
That breakthrough arrived in 1967. “Gentle on My Mind” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” brought Campbell four Grammy Awards and established him as a major solo artist. “Wichita Lineman” followed in 1968, becoming one of the defining recordings of his career and confirming his ability to cross easily between country and pop audiences.
His success soon extended far beyond records. In 1969, CBS launched The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, placing an Arkansas-born country performer in millions of American living rooms each week. That same year, Campbell appeared opposite John Wayne in True Grit, based on the novel by fellow Arkansan Charles Portis. He became not simply a country star, but a mainstream entertainer whose guitar playing, singing, television presence, and film work reached audiences far beyond Nashville.
More hits followed, including “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Southern Nights,” both of which became enduring fixtures of American popular music. Through changing styles and decades, Campbell remained recognizable for the clarity of his tenor voice and the remarkable instrumental skill that had first earned him a place in Los Angeles recording studios.
Campbell’s later years were marked by Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than disappear quietly, he undertook a farewell tour in 2012, performing while his abilities were beginning to fade and allowing audiences to witness both his courage and the depth of his musical instincts.
Glen Campbell died in 2017 and was buried in Billstown, not far from where his story began. He had been inducted into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005. His career remains an extraordinary Arkansas story: a boy with a five-dollar guitar who became a world-class musician and one of the most beloved crossover entertainers of his generation.