Glen Campbell (born April 22, 1936) is an American pop-country singer, ebst known for a series of 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. 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, 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 (1968 in music).
During the early 1970s, Campbell released a long series of singles and appeared in the move True Grit with John Wayne. After "Southern Nights" and "Sunflower"'s success, Campbell began having trouble reaching the charts, as well as abusing drugs. By 1989, however, he had quit drugs and was regularly reaching the Top Ten -- songs like "She's Gone, Gone, Gone" were extremely popular. In the 1990s, Campbell most retired from recording, though he has not quit entirely. In 1994, his autobiography]], Rhinestone Cowboy was published.
