"Big Bluegrass Special" by The Green River Boys & Glen Campbell.
Glen Campbell was a guitarist's guitarist. Whether as a studio player — he was a prominent early member of the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles — or for his own recording career, he was seemingly able to play with style and verve in any genre he was asked to tackle. That ability especially came to the fore in his own series of star-making singles and albums in the late 1960s. Campbell and producer Al de Lory created a mostly seamless amalgam of pop and country, which found the sweet spot of appeal to both audiences (and won Grammy awards in both genre categories as well). A hugely popular TV variety show and film appearances followed, to seal his place in the pop-culture firmament until his death on Monday, Aug. 8, in Nashville.
It took a few years for Campbell to find his niche as a pop-culture superstar. Wikipedia offers a concise wrap-up of the early days. The highlights: After some time in various bands in the 1950s, Campbell moved to Los Angeles in 1960, working as a session musician, playing in one of many lineups of The Champs ("Tequila") and writing songs. Before his breakout in 1967, there were a couple middle-of-the-chart successes and, surprisingly, five studio albums for Capitol Records.
Considering he was playing with a (mostly) instrumental rock band and his prior singles had been aimed at the pop market, it's surprising Campbell's debut album was a bluegrass effort. My guess is the label decided to first aim Campbell at the folk boom audience and saw a chance to record something quickly and (hopefully) cash in. It's fairly straight as a genre exercise, but they do cheat a bit with some light drums at times and (if I'm hearing it right) some occasional electric bass.
Big Bluegrass Special was credited to The Green River Boys & Glen Campbell; the Boys are identified as Dale Fitzsimmons and Carl Tanberg. The liner notes also refer to the Green River Boys as being "no strangers to record audiences," but if they had any prior releases I have not been able to discover what they were.
The album does not stray too far from bluegrass standards, leaning heavily on The Delmore Brothers with five covers of their numbers. The sole Campbell writing credit is a rewrite of "500 Miles," a song itself adapted from older folk songs. The one left-field song choice is "Long Black Limousine," which was fairly new at the time but has since gone on to become an oft-recorded number itself.
"Long Black Limousine" by the Green River Boys & Glen Campbell
Considering its obscurity today, it is no surprise to discover the album did not hit any of the record sales charts. Nor did any of Campbell's next LPs for Capitol. Too Late to Worry - Too Blue to Cry, from 1963, has intriguing echoes of the direction that would make Campbell a star in a few years. That potential direction was abandoned for a couple instrumental albums that also went nowhere: the folk-aimed The Astounding 12-String Guitar of Glen Campbell (which stayed in print and eventually sold quite well after Campbell became a star) and the rock-aimed The Big Bad Rock Guitar of Glen Campbell (so obscure I've never seen a copy). 1967's Burning Bridges album didn't sell much initially, either, but the title track as a single did finally hit on the formula that would take him to the top -- and hit the top 20 on Billboard's country chart. (Capitol T/ST 1810, 1962)
