The 1960s File Feature
Try A Little Kindness
Glen Campbell and the Recording of "Try a Little Kindness" Glen Travis Campbell was born on April 22, 1936, in Billstown, Arkansas, and came to national prom…
01 The Story
Glen Campbell and the Recording of "Try a Little Kindness"
Glen Travis Campbell was born on April 22, 1936, in Billstown, Arkansas, and came to national prominence not through the conventional route of sustained regional touring and label development but through his extraordinary career as a session musician in Los Angeles. During the early and mid-1960s, Campbell was among the most sought-after guitarists in the city's commercial recording scene, contributing to recordings by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Rick Nelson, and dozens of other major artists as part of the elite session collective informally known as the Wrecking Crew. His transition from invisible session player to credited performer began in earnest in 1967, when his recordings of "Gentle on My Mind" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" won Grammy Awards and established him as one of the defining artists at the intersection of country and pop.
"Try a Little Kindness" was written by Curt Sapaugh and Bobby Austin, a songwriting team that delivered Campbell the material at a moment when his recording career was at its most commercially prolific. The song was recorded in March and April 1969 at Capitol and United studios in Hollywood, produced by Al DeLory, whose soaring string arrangements and sophisticated orchestral textures had become the defining sound of Campbell's most successful recordings. DeLory's production work on Campbell's catalog during the late 1960s and early 1970s positioned the singer as a crossover artist capable of reaching both country and pop audiences simultaneously, a commercial positioning that was unusual and valuable in an industry that typically maintained strict genre separation.
Release and Multi-Chart Performance
The single was released in October 1969 on Capitol Records, catalog number Capitol 2659, with "Lonely My Lonely Friend" on the B-side. Its chart performance illustrated Campbell's exceptional crossover appeal more clearly than almost any other record in his catalog. The single reached number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, debuting on October 11, 1969 at number 89 and climbing steadily over eleven weeks, peaking during the week of November 29, 1969. It reached number 1 on the Easy Listening chart, number 2 on the Hot Country Songs chart, and number 1 on the Canadian RPM Adult Contemporary chart, making it one of the few records in that year to achieve simultaneous top-tier placement across country, adult contemporary, and pop formats.
The Hot 100 run of eleven weeks demonstrated the sustained commercial energy behind the release. The debut on October 11, 1969, at number 89 was followed by a steady climb: 67 in the second week, 44 in the third, 33 in the fourth, 26 in the fifth, and continuing upward until reaching its peak of 23. The Australian Go-Set chart placed the record at number 10, and the New Zealand Listener chart at number 4, indicating international commercial reach that complemented the domestic multi-format success.
Album Context and Industry Position
The song served as the title track for Campbell's fourteenth studio album, Try a Little Kindness, released in 1970 on Capitol. The album peaked at number 28 on the UK Albums Chart, extending the international reach of a record that was primarily aimed at the North American market. Campbell reportedly regarded "Try a Little Kindness" as one of his personal favorites among his own recordings, a preference consistent with the song's thematic content, which aligned with the singer's publicly expressed values around interpersonal decency and communal responsibility.
The 1969 recording session for "Try a Little Kindness" took place during a period of extraordinary productivity for Campbell. He was simultaneously maintaining a top-rated television variety program, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which ran on CBS from 1969 to 1972 and reached an estimated audience of 50 million viewers per week at its peak. This media presence amplified the commercial impact of his recordings considerably, giving each new single a promotional platform that few other artists could access. The combination of television visibility, multi-format chart success, and DeLory's production sophistication made Campbell one of the most commercially powerful presences in American popular music at the turn of the decade.
Songwriting Credits and Cover Versions
Curt Sapaugh and Bobby Austin's composition proved durable enough to attract cover versions from a range of artists, including the Oak Ridge Boys, Vera Lynn with the Jordanaires, and Dominic Kirwan, testifying to the song's adaptability across different performance contexts and audience demographics. The original Campbell recording remained the definitive version, however, its position in the popular consciousness secured by the combination of DeLory's orchestral production approach, Campbell's technically assured vocal performance, and the timing of its release at the height of the singer's commercial dominance.
02 Song Meaning
Compassion as Philosophy: The Themes of "Try a Little Kindness"
"Try a Little Kindness" is one of the more explicitly philosophical records to achieve mainstream country-pop crossover success in the late 1960s. The song's central argument, that extending basic human decency to others is both ethically correct and practically beneficial, is delivered not as a complex theological proposition but as a direct, experience-grounded assertion. Curt Sapaugh and Bobby Austin's lyric operates at the level of common observation rather than abstract doctrine, grounding its message in the recognizable textures of ordinary social life rather than in the language of formal ethics or religious instruction.
This accessibility was part of what made the song commercially effective across multiple format categories simultaneously. The message of interpersonal kindness as a foundational social value had appeal across the demographic range of country, adult contemporary, and pop audiences, each of which brought different cultural frameworks to the listening experience but could recognize the song's core argument as consistent with their own values. Glen Campbell's vocal delivery reinforced this universal appeal; his ability to convey sincerity without sentimentality, warmth without condescension, made him an ideal vehicle for material that risked becoming saccharine in less skilled hands.
Cultural Context of 1969
The song arrived in the fall of 1969 at a moment of acute social division in the United States. The Vietnam War was generating sustained domestic conflict, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 had deepened a pervasive sense of political crisis, and the cultural divisions between what commentators were beginning to call the "silent majority" and the counterculture were becoming increasingly sharp. In this context, a song advocating for simple human kindness carried a political resonance that its explicit lyrical content did not foreground but could not entirely escape.
Campbell's positioning as a crossover artist who appealed simultaneously to country audiences, who tended toward political conservatism, and to pop audiences, who were more ideologically diverse, meant that "Try a Little Kindness" could function as a kind of cultural bridge, a record that found common emotional ground across what were otherwise hardening demographic and ideological divisions. This bridging function was not the song's explicit intent, but it contributed to the record's commercial success and to Campbell's broader cultural significance as a performer who seemed to speak to an entire country rather than to a particular segment of it.
The Campbell Television Moment and Musical Legacy
The song's release in the context of Campbell's Goodtime Hour television program gave it exposure that amplified its cultural reach considerably. Television variety programming in the late 1960s reached audiences of a scale that subsequent fragmented media environments have never replicated, and Campbell's weekly presence in living rooms across the country ensured that his recordings carried an intimacy and familiarity that purely radio-distributed music could not match. The combination of television personality and recording artist made the message of the song feel personal in a way that abstract advocacy never could.
The song's continued presence in cover versions and compilation appearances across multiple decades indicates its durability as a statement of values that transcends the specific commercial and cultural circumstances of its initial release. Its top-10 placements across country, adult contemporary, and international charts testified to the breadth of its original appeal, while its persistence in the popular repertoire suggests that the emotional and moral content it delivers remains recognizable and relevant to audiences well removed from the social context of late-1960s America.
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