The 1970s File Feature
It's Only Make Believe
Glen Campbell and "It's Only Make Believe": Country Crossover at the Dawn of a New Decade Glen Campbell's recording of "It's Only Make Believe" arrived on th…
01 The Story
Glen Campbell and "It's Only Make Believe": Country Crossover at the Dawn of a New Decade
Glen Campbell's recording of "It's Only Make Believe" arrived on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 5, 1970, and proceeded to chart for twelve weeks, climbing from its debut position of number 82 to a peak of number 10 on October 31, 1970. The performance established "It's Only Make Believe" as one of Campbell's stronger crossover successes, demonstrating the country singer's continued ability to move seamlessly between country formats and the mainstream pop chart at a moment when his career was at something close to its commercial apex.
The song had an established history before Campbell recorded it. Conway Twitty had written and recorded "It's Only Make Believe" in 1958, and his version had been a major pop hit, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and establishing Twitty as a commercial force in the late rockabilly and early pop era. The original recording had a dramatic, operatic quality that owed something to the influence of Elvis Presley's ballad style and something to the broader pop-country tradition of the period. For Campbell to revisit the song in 1970 was to engage with a piece of material that carried significant weight in the history of country-influenced popular music.
Campbell's version was produced by Al De Loy for Capitol Records and reflected the production values of the country-pop crossover market in the early 1970s. By this point in his career, Campbell had established a distinctive sound that drew on his extraordinary instrumental ability, particularly his guitar work, while surrounding his vocals with orchestral arrangements that made his recordings accessible to audiences beyond the traditional country radio format. This approach had produced a series of substantial commercial successes in the late 1960s, including recordings of Jimmy Webb compositions like "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," and "Galveston" that had reached wide audiences and earned considerable critical respect.
The decision to record "It's Only Make Believe" in 1970 reflected Campbell's willingness to revisit earlier popular repertoire and his confidence in his ability to bring something new to established material. The song appeared on his album The Glen Campbell Goodtime Album, which was characteristic of the period's tendency to frame popular recordings within a context of good-humored entertainment. Campbell's instinct for accessible, warmly produced material made him one of the most commercially reliable artists on the Capitol roster during this period.
The chart success of Campbell's "It's Only Make Believe" in late 1970 placed it within a period of transition for American popular music. The turbulence of the late 1960s, with its radical experimentation and countercultural energy, was giving way to a somewhat more settled commercial landscape, in which polished country-pop crossover recordings could find audiences that had not been available during the height of the psychedelic era. Campbell's position within this landscape was advantageous: his mainstream credentials and his ability to work across country and pop formats made him an ideal artist for a moment when the music industry was looking for reliable commercial properties.
Campbell's television presence during this period, through his variety program The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which aired on CBS from 1969 to 1972, was also a significant factor in sustaining and extending his commercial reach. Television exposure of this kind allowed him to maintain visibility with audiences who might not have been frequent radio listeners, and the recordings he made during the show's run benefited from the promotional platform it provided. "It's Only Make Believe" charted during a period when the show was still attracting substantial viewership, and the connection between his broadcast presence and his record sales was not coincidental.
The twelve-week chart run of Campbell's version illustrated the durability of the song's appeal across different eras and recording styles. Conway Twitty's original had been a product of the late 1950s rock and roll moment, while Campbell's version was a product of the country-pop crossover sensibility of the early 1970s. The fact that the same material could generate substantial chart success in both contexts demonstrated something important about the song itself: its emotional core was robust enough to survive significant changes in musical setting and cultural context.
Glen Campbell's career during this period was one of the most sustained examples of successful crossover artistry in the history of American popular music. His ability to record material associated with diverse traditions — from the sophisticated pop compositions of Jimmy Webb to the classic country of earlier decades — while maintaining a coherent artistic identity was an unusual talent. "It's Only Make Believe" benefited from this versatility, as Campbell brought to it the same warmth and technical assurance that characterized his most celebrated recordings, giving a familiar song a genuinely fresh and commercially appealing presentation.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "It's Only Make Believe": Fantasy, Self-Deception, and the Romantic Imagination
"It's Only Make Believe" explores a psychological territory that has been among the most enduring subjects of popular song: the capacity of the human imagination to construct an emotional reality that the external world does not support. The song's narrator acknowledges, with a mixture of resignation and wonder, that the romantic scenario he inhabits exists primarily in his own mind rather than in any verifiable shared experience. This act of self-aware self-deception gives the song an emotional complexity that transcends the simple heartbreak ballad it might superficially appear to be.
When Conway Twitty wrote and first recorded the song in 1958, he gave voice to a persona that was simultaneously vulnerable and oddly dignified. The acknowledgment that one's emotional life is built on fantasy is not a comfortable admission, yet the song's narrator makes it with a directness that transforms potential embarrassment into something closer to philosophical acceptance. The make-believe of the title is not presented as a failure of perception but as a mode of engagement with experience that has its own internal coherence and even its own kind of pleasure.
Glen Campbell's 1970 recording of the song brought these themes into a new cultural context. By the beginning of the 1970s, the innocent romanticism of the late 1950s pop era had been complicated by a decade of social upheaval, political disillusionment, and the emergence of more psychologically sophisticated modes of personal expression in popular culture. Campbell's warm, technically accomplished vocal delivery gave the song's themes a more settled quality, less the anguish of a young man discovering the gap between desire and reality and more the reflective acknowledgment of someone who has come to understand that gap as a permanent feature of romantic experience.
The concept of make-believe as a mode of emotional life has broader cultural resonances that the song implicitly engaged. American popular culture had always maintained a complex relationship with fantasy and its relationship to lived experience, from the escapist entertainments of the Depression era through the romantic idealism that permeated mid-century film and popular music. The song's title reached into this tradition, acknowledging the function that imagination plays in sustaining people through circumstances that might otherwise be intolerable.
There is also a reading of "It's Only Make Believe" that gives the narrator's self-awareness a more active quality. By naming his fantasy as fantasy, the narrator claims a kind of agency over it. The make-believe is not something that happens to him but something he participates in knowingly, a distinction that changes the emotional valence of the song significantly. This reading aligns with a tradition of romantic songs in which the acceptance of unrequited feeling or impossible desire carries its own form of emotional satisfaction, a bittersweet contentment that is more nuanced than either fulfillment or pure disappointment.
Glen Campbell's decision to record the song twelve years after its original release reflected his understanding of the timelessness of these themes. The emotional territory of romantic self-deception does not date in the way that more topically specific material does, and the song's formal elegance — its clear melodic line and its precise emotional statement — gave it a durability that Campbell recognized and honored in his recording. The result was a version that spoke to the same fundamental human experiences as the original while finding them freshly resonant within the context of its own cultural moment.
→ More from Glen Campbell
View all Glen Campbell hits →
→ More from the 1970s File
View all 1970s hits →
Keep digging