Glen Campbell 1936 - 2017

Just as we were going to press with the last issue of Guitarist we heard the sad news that country giant, TV star and brilliant guitar player Glen Campbell had died. We look back on his life and career…

Where most people might associate Glen Campbell with hit country songs such as Rhinestone Cowboy, Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix, many will know that he was also a stellar guitarist. He was, at one time, a member of The Wrecking Crew, a group of first-call session players based in LA during the 1960s, however, back at the beginning, things were very different indeed…

Glen Travis Campbell was born on 22 April, 1936 in Billstown, Arkansas. He was the twelfth child of a sharecropper John Wesley and Carrie Dell Campbell, entering the world in the depths of the Great Depression. His parents’ farm grew a few basic crops including cotton, corn and potatoes. The going was tough and, later on, the young Glen would help supplement the family income by picking cotton on neighbouring farms.

Meanwhile, his musical talents had begun to make themselves known while he was just little more than a toddler, resulting in his father buying him a five-dollar guitar from the Sears & Roebuck mail-order catalogue when Glen was just four years old. Initially taking lessons from an uncle and learning songs he heard on the radio, he began to flourish and by the time he reached his teenage years, he was earning money playing gigs and appearing on local radio stations. A move to Albuquerque, New Mexico at the age of 17 saw him find regular work by joining his uncle’s band, Dick Bills And The Mountain Boys, later forming his own band, the Western Wranglers. But the big break appeared on the horizon when musicians passing through the town persuaded him to move to Los Angeles in 1960.

Wrecking Crew