Glen Campbell
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- This article is about the singer. There is also, in Clearfield County of western Pennsylvania, the town of Glen Campbell.
Glen Campbell (born April 22, 1936) is an American pop-country singer, best known for a series of 1960s and 1970s hits, including "Galveston", "Rhinestone Cowboy", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", and "Southern Nights".
Campbell is a native of Delight, Arkansas and began playing the guitar as a youth without ever learning to read music. By the time he was eighteen, Campbell was touring the south as part of the Western Wranglers. In 1958, Campbell moved to Los Angeles to become a session musician.
Campbell's period as a session musician was successful, and he played with Bobby Darin, Rick Nelson, the Beach Boys (for which he was a touring member for a while in 1965), Merle Haggard, the Monkees, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, the Association, and the Mamas & the Papas, among others. His debut single was the moderate success "Turn Around, Look at Me". "Too Late to Worry - Too Blue to Cry" and "Kentucky Means Paradise" were similarly popular within only a small section of the country audience. By 1967, Campbell was ready to break through to the mainstream with "Gentle on My Mind" (written by John Hartford) and "I Wanna Live" in 1968 ( see 1968 in music).
Campbell's biggest hits in 1968-1969 came on evocative songs written by Jimmy Webb: "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", and "Galveston". Campbell's voice and phrasing conveyed the songs' emotional content perfectly.
After he hosted a 1968 summer replacement for the Smothers Brothers television show, Campbell had his own weekly variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, from January 1969 through June 1972. At the height of his popularity, a 1970 biography by Freda Kramer, The Glen Campbell Story, was published.
During the early 1970s, Campbell released a long series of singles and appeared in the movies True Grit with John Wayne and Kim Darby and Norwood with Kim Darby and Joe Namath. In the mid-1970s he had more big hits with "Rhinestone Cowboy", "Southern Nights", and "Sunflower".
Subsequently, Campbell began having trouble reaching the charts, and began to abuse drugs. By 1989, however, he had quit drugs and was regularly reaching the country Top Ten; songs like "She's Gone, Gone, Gone" were extremely popular. In the 1990s, Campbell mostly retired from recording, though he has not quit entirely. In 1994, his autobiography, Rhinestone Cowboy, was published.
Campbell returned to the charts in 2002 with a hit remake of "Rhinestone Cowboy" with UK dance producers Rikki & Daz.
Marriages include
- 1955-1959 to Diane Kirk, daughter Debra Kay
- 1959-1976 to Billie Jean Nunley, daughter Kelli Glen, son William Travis
- 1976-1982 to Sarah Davis
- 1982 to present, Kimberly (Kim) Woollen, son Nicklaus Caledonia, son Shanon Webb, daughter Ashley Noel (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fawkes_tears/)
External links
- His page at Launch (http://launch.yahoo.com/artist/default.asp?artistID=1004322)
- Official site (http://www.glencampbellshow.com)