Glen Campbell
#
104
Ranking
Hall of Famer
BIRTHDATE
BIRTHPLACE
Billstown
,
AR
,
USA
81
5
'
10
"
DIED
Glen Campbell (born April 22, 1936) was a Delight, Arkansas-born country and pop legend who rose from sharecropper poverty as the seventh of twelve children to become one of Hollywood's most in-demand session guitarists before scoring his own string of timeless hits including "Wichita Lineman," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," and "Rhinestone Cowboy," winning six Grammy Awards, earning a Country Music Hall of Fame induction, and delivering one of the most emotionally powerful farewell tours in music history after his 2011 Alzheimer's diagnosis, before passing away on August 8, 2017, at age 81.
Current Tour & Setlist
Glen Campbell gave his final performance on November 30, 2012, in Napa, California, and spent his final years receiving care at a memory facility in Nashville, Tennessee, where he passed away on August 8, 2017, at age 81. His life and his farewell tour were the subject of the 2014 documentary "Glen Campbell... I'll Be Me," which was nominated for a Grammy and won a Critics' Choice award, bringing a new generation of fans to his music in the most bittersweet possible way. His legacy is celebrated today through his daughter Ashley Campbell's ongoing music career, a museum in his hometown of Delight, Arkansas, and an enduring catalog that bridges the worlds of country, pop, folk, and easy listening with a guitar virtuosity that remains breathtaking more than 60 years after his first Los Angeles session.
Early Life
Born Glen Travis Campbell on April 22, 1936, on a sharecropper's farm between Billstown and Delight, Arkansas, the seventh son in a family of twelve children, he grew up picking cotton for $1.25 per hundred pounds alongside his father and siblings in some of the harshest poverty of the Great Depression era, with the family's one great luxury being music, as virtually every relative played or sang. His father bought him a $5 Sears and Roebuck guitar when he was four, he was performing on local radio by age six, and after dropping out of school in the tenth grade he joined his uncle Dick Bills's Sandia Mountain Boys in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before forming his own band the Western Wranglers in 1958 and relocating to Los Angeles in 1960 to become one of the most in-demand session guitarists in the history of American popular music.
Career Highlights
In Los Angeles, Campbell became a founding member of the elite session musician collective known as the Wrecking Crew, playing guitar on hundreds of recordings for artists including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Merle Haggard, and the Beach Boys, for whom he temporarily filled in for an ailing Brian Wilson on tour in 1964 and 1965. His solo career exploded with the back-to-back Jimmy Webb-penned classics "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Wichita Lineman" in 1967 and 1968, and he crossed fully into mainstream stardom with his CBS television variety show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour from 1969 to 1972 and the number-one pop and country smash "Rhinestone Cowboy" in 1975. He won six Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, and after going public with his Alzheimer's disease diagnosis in June 2011, launched a stunning and emotionally devastating farewell tour that produced the acclaimed documentary "Glen Campbell... I'll Be Me" before giving his final performance on November 30, 2012.
Family & Personal Life
Campbell was married four times: to Diane Marie Kirk (1955 to 1959), Billie Jean Nunley (1959 to 1976) with whom he had four children including sons Travis and Kane, Sarah Barg Davis (1976 to 1980) with whom he had son Dillon, and finally to Kimberly Woollen in 1982, who remained his wife and primary caregiver through his long battle with Alzheimer's until his death. He had nine children in total, including daughter Ashley Campbell, who is a singer-songwriter and banjo player who opened shows on his farewell tour and has continued to perform and record in his honor, and his deeply public battle with Alzheimer's made him one of the most prominent faces of the disease's awareness movement in his final years.
Awards
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