Glen Campbell

Glen Travis Campbell (April 22, 1936 – August 8, 2017) was an American country musician and actor. He was best known for a series of hit songs in the 1960s and 1970s, and for hosting The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on CBS television from 1969 until 1972. A revered session guitarist before breaking through as a solo performer, Campbell released 64 albums in a career that spanned five decades, selling over 45 million records worldwide, including twelve gold albums, four platinum albums, and one double-platinum album.

Born in Billstown, Arkansas, Campbell began his professional career as a studio musician in Los Angeles, spending several years playing with the group of instrumentalists later known as "The Wrecking Crew". After he became a solo artist, 80 of his songs made it onto the Billboard Country Chart, the Billboard Hot 100, or the Adult Contemporary Chart; 29 of those made the top ten, and nine of them reached number one, on at least one of those charts. Among Campbell's hits are "Universal Soldier" (his first hit from 1965), "Gentle on My Mind" (1967), "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (1967), "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" (1968), "Wichita Lineman" (1968), "Galveston" (1969), "Rhinestone Cowboy" (1975), and "Southern Nights" (1977).

In 1967, Campbell won four Grammys in the country and pop categories. For "Gentle on My Mind", he received two awards in country and western; "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" did the same in pop. Three of his early hits later won Grammy Hall of Fame Awards (2000, 2004, 2008), while Campbell himself won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. He owned trophies for Male Vocalist of the Year from both the Country Music Association (CMA) and the Academy of Country Music (ACM), and took the CMA's top award as 1968 Entertainer of the Year. Campbell played a supporting role in the film True Grit (1969), which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. He also sang the title song, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Campbell announced he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2011 and retired in 2013 after recording his final song, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You". He died from the disease on August 8, 2017, at the age of 81.

Glen Travis Campbell was born on April 22, 1936, in Billstown, a tiny community near Delight in Pike County, Arkansas, to John Wesley Campbell (a sharecropper) and Carrie Dell (née Stone) Campbell. Campbell was of Scottish descent and was the seventh son of 12 children. As a child he almost died from drowning. His family went to the Church of Christ, and Campbell's brother Lindell became a Church of Christ minister. In 2011, Campbell said his mother was Irish; although she was born in the United States, her family had emigrated from County Tipperary. The family lived on a farm, where they barely managed, by growing cotton, corn, watermelons and potatoes. "We had no electricity," he said, and money was scarce. "A dollar in those days looked as big as a saddle blanket." To supplement income, the family picked cotton for other farmers. "I picked cotton for $1.25 a hundred pounds," Campbell said. "If you worked your tail off, you could pick 80 or 90 pounds a day."

Campbell started playing guitar at age 4 after his father gave him a Sears-bought five-dollar guitar as a gift, with his uncle Boo teaching him the basics of how to play. Most of his family was musical, he said. "Back home, everybody plays and sings." By the time he was 6 he was performing on local radio stations.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.