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Glen Campbell

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I don’t know why, but one of my earliest memories is of singing along to “Rhinestone Cowboy” with my mother:

Glen Campbell, the multiple Grammy-winning country-pop singer, guitarist and TV personality whose half-century career was capped by a singular last act after he went public with his advancing Alzheimer’s disease, has died. He was 81.

Possessed of a crystalline tenor voice and boy-next-door good looks, Campbell sold more than 45 million records and was known for a signature string of ‘60s and ’70s country music hits that included “Gentle on My Mind,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

[…]

By all accounts, Campbell’s early life was one of severe poverty that included picking cotton in the fields alongside his brothers. The seeds of his career were planted at the age of 4 when he received a guitar that had been ordered from a Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail-order catalog.

By age 6, he was skilled enough to appear on local radio stations, and by 10th grade he would quit high school to pursue a music career full time. By the time he was 20, he had joined his uncle’s band — the Albuquerque-based Sandia Mountain Boys — where he would hone his skills before striking out on his own to form Glen Campbell and the Western Wranglers in 1958.

In his 20s, Campbell, who had come west to Los Angeles to seek stardom, flourished as part of the Wrecking Crew, the fabled, though mostly unknown to the public, collective of studio and session musicians who played behind some of the biggest names in the music business.

He would become a longtime resident of the Los Angeles area. In this early stage in his career, he was sought after as a virtuoso guitarist, and his brisk, confident guitar work was part of, among many others, Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas,” The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” and “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys, with whom he would briefly go on tour as a substitute for Brian Wilson.

R.I.P.


…Paul beat me to it.

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