When Glen Campbell Sang “Galveston”

“She was twenty-one/When I left Galveston”

Although initially performed the year before by another artist, Don Ho, it was in January of 1969 that Glen Campbell released the single “Galveston,” which would later serve as the title track for the album Galveston that came out that March. “Galveston” reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and would be a mainstay of Campbell’s live performances, even included in his Goodbye Tour in 2011 and 2012, which was completed not long before his death in 2017.

The song, like several of Campbell’s other hits, was written by Jimmy Webb, one of the most capable songwriters I know of. (Webb is also “the only artist to ever receive Grammy awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration.”) Webb wrote many of my favorite songs of that era and genre, such as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”; “The Wichita Lineman”; and its critics be damned, “MacArthur Park.” But “Galveston,” more than the others, stays with me, particularly for the questions it—intentionally or otherwise—raises. While it is surely a rumination on love deferred (like so much of Webb’s oeuvre), Campbell’s take on “Galveston” raises the philosophical question of what one might most miss were he to be killed that night in a war zone or, for the rest of us, if—God forbid—we don’t wake up tomorrow.

Now, Campbell was not one’s typical musician against the war, and like Johnnie Wright, had little interest in using his music to undermine, as he saw it, the war effort. (1) And this is how we got Campbell’s take on Webb’s song, which actually makes it a bit more lyrically interesting—for our purposes—than the original. (2)