By Stephen Smoot
The concept of success almost gets killed by its own press. All too often sanitized stories of how a person makes their way to the top focuses on the glitz and glamor, with a few obstacles tossed in just to make it believable. They make finding one’s dreams look easy.
People need the real hard edges of a story to understand what is possible with hard work, determination, and sheer tenacity.
In the real world, away from television screens and glamorous publications, the road to success is paved not with golden bricks, but hard work sacrifice, personal privation, and sometimes even despair.
Take the story of a young man born in 1936, during the worst days of the Great Depression in the (then) impoverished state of Arkansas. This son of a sharecropper was the seventh born of 11 brothers and sisters and joined them regularly in the fields to pick cotton to support the family.
But almost all of the children grew up loving to listen to and create music.
The seventh son showed special promise in that art before most children even learn to read, which inspired his father to save the hefty sum of $5 to provide his four year old son a Sears and Roebuck guitar.
The seventh son never took to school and dropped out at the age of 14, but he had by that point several years under his belt as a paid performer for concerts and even radio broadcasts. He first joined his Uncle Dick and played bars and other country hot spots, then formed his own band the Western Wranglers, which did not last long.
Searching for success took the seventh son from the deserts and mountains of his musical stomping grounds between Wyoming and New Mexico. He went to where almost all looked first for entertainment success after World War II, the then gleaming and new environs of Los Angeles.
While the young man worked hard to build his reputation in a competitive field, the music itself came easy. He could usually learn a song after hearing it once, no more than twice. As an employee of American Music Company, then Capitol Records, he developed into an in-demand session player.
The seventh son found his way into a loose group of session artists that called themselves “The Wrecking Crew.” Most of the hottest acts of the 60s went to this group for the best performers. He played behind everyone from Merle Haggard to The Byrds, appearing in 586 cuts in 1963 alone.
The most memorable work came when he played behind one of his biggest heroes. Old Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra’s manager called on him to perform in the song “Strangers In the Night.”
Despite working with the biggest rock and country acts of the 60s, playing for Sinatra brought out the fan in the seventh son. Sinatra was so unnerved by the young man’s constant staring that he asked “who’s that (expletive) guitar player looking at me?”
Though the exact quote varies from story to story, the unflattering comment could have devastated the young man. But the seventh son had worked too hard for too long. He later said “I’ll never forget that. I didn’t take it for granted.”
By 1967 the seventh son broke into his own as a hit singer, generally working in the Nashville sound style. Although he produced hit after hit, the mantle of fame never set well on him.
Eight years after he made it big, the seventh son sang his signature song, a work that paralleled both the hustle, work, and sacrifice to get to the top, and also told how success doesn’t provide all the happiness it seems to promise.
Although he followed the road to his horizon, and ended up where the lights were shining on him, the “Rhinestone Cowboy” Glen Campbell struggled and fought his way to the top. To this day, he serves as an example for every other musician who came from the middle of nowhere and earned his success.