“My head is still there”: the song that took Glen Campbell back to his Arkansas childhood
Glen Campbell was one of the all-time greats, of that there can be no doubt, and there can be no argument.
Across both his session work and his solo career, Campbell proved his remarkable talent again and again. As a guitarist, he recorded with an extraordinary range of artists, including the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, The Monkees, Nancy Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr, and Elvis, among many others.
Throughout his own career, he also delivered timeless and mesmerising songs such as ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Gentle on My Mind’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Galveston’, ‘It’s Over’ and ‘Little Green Apples’. Time and again, Campbell showed that he had rhythm, guts, love and spirit, with the soul of his country beating through his hands and his voice.
Somebody else who had the pure-distilled spirit of American music in his blood, and who also played with an enviable variety of artists like The Band and Dr John, Wings and Albert King, Etta James, Ann Peebles, Mavis Staples, Patti Labelle, Solomon Burke and Aaron Neville, was the legendary New Orleans pianist, performer, writer, arranger and producer, Allen Toussaint.
Toussaint and Campbell were two of the best, and neither one is spoken about nearly enough anymore. They might seem to have come from different worlds, with different musical backgrounds and languages, but they will forever be connected through Campbell’s last-ever number one song, the Toussaint-penned ‘Southern Nights’.
Toussaint’s version, which appeared on his 1975 album of the same name, sounds like it’s not just from another region to Campbell’s later cover, but from another universe entirely. His version is a celestial swirl of piano, keyboards, clavichord, distorted percussion and a vocal that is drenched in a hazy, mystical and phantasmagoric reverb. Campbell, in contrast, called on his country roots for the song, and, in fact, it was his own Southern roots that drew him to the lyric in the first place, blending them with an almost disco rhythm, appropriately for the year, and filled the track with a sort of funk and rhythm and blues that you’d sooner expect to hear from Toussaint himself.
In fact, rhythm and blues and country is a blend that Toussaint had been experimenting with at least as early as 1971’s Toussaint/From a Whisper to a Scream album and the track ‘Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (From Now On)’ which is, naturally, a funky gumbo blend of Southern ingredients: a dash of horns, guitar lines from both sides of the railway tracks and a steady, propulsive rhythm.
Six years on, Campbell had taken that feel-good blend and dialled it all the way up as high as it would go. He tacked on an infectious country lick that he learned from Jerry Reed and turned up the tempo, where it’s impossible to feel bad when you’re listening to his version of ‘Southern Nights’. This is not a song of the South, such as you’d find on a Randy Newman record. Campbell’s track sounds exactly the way that it feels to walk in step with the one you love through the late evening summer sun on a balmy Nashville night, and captures the magnificence, magnetic and soulful energy that warms the air in Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge and New Orleans. It feels so good it’s frightening.
“My dad told me when I was a kid, ‘You’re having the best time of your life, and you don’t even know it’,” Campbell said in a conversation about the song, and in thinking back to his Arkansas childhood, he added, “Sure enough, he was right. Now I really feel the need to go back home, float down the Missouri River, and fish for bass and crappies. It’s real peaceful, and remote from things like telephones. My head is still there.”
For Toussaint, whose history is inextricable from New Orleans and the sounds of the South, the song was vitally important to him, as well, and was infused with the spirit, energy and memories of his ancestors. He said that “I really felt highly, highly inspired and very spiritual doing that song. It’s the only one I felt that much about. Some others have been inspired highly, but not as high as that one”.
