ABSTRACT
In 2010, country-pop performer Glen Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Between then and his death in 2017, Campbell recorded a trilogy of dementia-themed concept albums, conducted an extensive “Goodbye Tour,” and won a Grammy for a documentary that followed him and his family as they navigated through the effects of cognitive impairment. Through these efforts and their openness about his condition, Campbell and his family have significantly raised public awareness about the kinds of issues faced by carers and those who live with Alzheimer’s disease.
This chapter examines Campbell’s “late” career, with a close focus on how health and age factored into his studio recordings. In the process, this chapter proposes that popular music is an important domain in which ideas about dementia, ageing, and care are consumed by an increasingly older audience base. Recent scholarship on cultural representations of cognitive impairment has tended to focus on visual and literary sources, thereby ignoring musical depictions of dementia, despite a mounting body of scientific evidence that suggests that music can aid memory retention and improve the emotional well-being of those living with Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite considerable media attention, few scholars have studied thoroughly how Alzheimer’s disease, or ageing more generally, influenced the music-making of the Arkansan artist known as the “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Even fewer have thought more critically about how Campbell, his family, and the music industry apparatus around him represented his illness, age, and care network through musical performance and a carefully managed marketing campaign.
