It lasts barely two and a half minutes, and it asks for almost nothing. Not a revolution, not a protest, not a grand gesture — just a small, practical decency, offered to a stranger on an ordinary day. When Glen Campbell released “Try a Little Kindness” in the autumn of 1969, America was not in a mood for gentle advice. The year had brought the Vietnam War grinding on, cities still raw from the previous summer’s unrest, and a generation split over just about everything. Into that noise came a warm Arkansas voice, backed by a bright, unhurried arrangement, suggesting that the world might be fixed one small act at a time. It was not the biggest hit of Campbell’s career, and it was not the most dramatic. But it may be the one that best explains why he mattered: he could take a simple song and make it sound like common sense, and he could make common sense sound like a hit.
To understand why the song landed, you have to understand where Glen Campbell stood in 1969. He was not a newcomer, and he was not a Nashville insider who had come up the usual way. Born in 1936 in Delight, Arkansas, one of twelve children in a sharecropping family, he had arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1960s and become one of the most in-demand session guitarists in the business, a member of the loose circle of studio players later nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. He played on records by the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and dozens of others, and he even filled in for Brian Wilson on tour with the Beach Boys. Then, in 1967, he became a star in his own right. “Gentle on My Mind,” John Hartford’s restless, poetic song, gave him his first major solo hit, and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” followed it. In 1968 came “Wichita Lineman,” a song so beautifully strange — a love song sung by a man up a telephone pole — that it became one of the defining records of the decade. By 1969, Campbell was everywhere: on the radio, on television, and, from January of that year, hosting his own CBS variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, which ran until 1972. He was the rare singer who belonged to country, pop and easy listening radio all at once, and his audience trusted him in a way they trusted few other stars.
That trust is the whole story of “Try a Little Kindness.” The song was written by two working country songwriters, Curt Sapaugh and Bobby Austin. Austin was a country singer in his own right, best known for his 1967 hit “Apartment No. 9,” and he knew the Nashville writing rooms from the inside. Little is documented about the particular afternoon the song was written, and that absence is, in its way, fitting: this was not a song born from a dramatic anecdote, but from a craftsman’s instinct for a plain, sturdy idea. The lyric is built from small scenes rather than slogans. It looks at the people most of us hurry past — the down-and-out, the lonely, the ones having a worse day than we are — and suggests, without scolding, that a helping hand beats a doubting glance. The kindness it asks for costs nothing, and the song never pretends otherwise. That modesty was the point. In a year when so many records shouted, this one spoke quietly, and people leaned in to hear it.
Campbell recorded the song in March and April of 1969, at Capitol and United studios in Hollywood, with Al De Lory producing. De Lory was the architect of Campbell’s Capitol sound: he had produced and arranged the run of hits that began with “Gentle on My Mind,” and he understood how to frame Campbell’s voice — warm, clear, and utterly without affectation — in arrangements that were polished but never stiff. De Lory arranged the track with Marty Paich, and the session drew on the cream of Los Angeles studio talent, with Campbell himself singing and playing acoustic guitar. The record runs just over two minutes and twenty seconds, and it wastes none of them. It opens with an easy, forward-moving groove, Campbell’s voice enters like a man talking to a neighbor over a fence, and the arrangement swells gently behind him without ever getting in the way. It sounds, as so many Campbell records did, effortless — which is exactly what made it so hard to imitate.
Capitol released “Try a Little Kindness” as a single in October 1969, and its chart story tells you precisely what kind of hit it was. On the Billboard Hot 100 it entered at number 89 on the chart dated October 11, 1969, climbed steadily for seven weeks inside the Top 40, and peaked at number 23 on November 29, spending eleven weeks on the chart in all. On the country chart it did better, reaching number two for one week. But its real home was the Easy Listening chart, the survey of the adult, middle-of-the-road audience that had made Campbell a star: there it reached number one for one week, on the chart dated November 15, 1969. That made Campbell the only act to top the Easy Listening chart three times in 1969, after “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston” had done the same earlier in the year. Abroad, the song reached number one on both the Canadian country and adult contemporary charts, number five on Canada’s pop chart, number ten in Australia and number four in New Zealand. It was, in short, a hit everywhere Campbell’s audience lived — which, by 1969, was just about everywhere.
The album that followed confirmed the song’s place in his career. Try a Little Kindness, his fourteenth studio album, was released in January 1970 on Capitol, with De Lory again producing, and the title track was, by Campbell’s own account, one of his favorite songs. The album reached number twelve on the Billboard 200, spending twenty-eight weeks on the chart, number four on the country albums chart, and was certified gold in February 1970. Its follow-up single, “Honey Come Back,” kept the run going into the new decade. And the song itself became a fixture of Campbell’s television show and concert repertoire, the kind of number an audience greets with recognition in the first two bars. It was also, tellingly, included on his 1971 Greatest Hits collection, alongside “Gentle on My Mind,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Galveston” — the company it has kept ever since.
What made the song last was not its chart peak, which was modest by Campbell’s standards, but its message, which refused to date. The late 1960s produced plenty of anthems, and most of them now sound like museum pieces, tied to a moment that has passed. “Try a Little Kindness” sounds like advice for any Tuesday. Its scenes are deliberately ordinary: a stranger, a hard day, a hand offered instead of a judgment passed. Campbell sang it without a trace of preachiness, and that restraint is the performance. A lesser singer would have turned it into a lecture; Campbell turned it into a suggestion, delivered with the easy confidence of a man who had grown up poor in Arkansas and never forgot what it felt like to need a break. That is why the song has outlived the year it was made in, while bigger, louder records from the same autumn have faded. It does not ask you to join anything. It asks you to notice someone.
The year around the song helps explain its warmth. 1969 was, by any measure, Campbell’s busiest year. “Galveston,” another Jimmy Webb song, had given him a Top 5 pop hit that spring, and he had stepped onto the big screen alongside John Wayne in True Grit, singing the film’s title song. His Goodtime Hour, launched that January, was bringing his easy, joking presence into living rooms every week, and his concerts were selling out across the country. He was, in other words, at the exact center of American popular culture — not as a rebel or a prophet, but as a neighbor. That was his particular gift, and “Try a Little Kindness” used it perfectly. A more strident singer would have made the song sound like a lecture; a more detached one would have made it sound like a slogan. Campbell sang it the way he hosted his show: like a man who genuinely liked people and assumed the best of them until proven otherwise. Audiences could hear the difference, and they rewarded it.
The recording itself deserves a closer listen, because its simplicity is deceptive. De Lory’s arrangement, shared with Marty Paich, builds the track the way a good conversation builds: it starts small, with Campbell’s guitar and voice up front, and lets the band enter gradually, so that by the chorus the record feels full without ever feeling crowded. The session personnel read like a roll call of the Los Angeles studio world Campbell himself had come from — guitarists Al Casey, bassists Joe Osborn and Carol Kaye, drummer Hal Blaine — players who had made hundreds of hits and knew exactly how much to play and how much to leave alone. Campbell, who had been one of them only a few years earlier, sang over their work with the confidence of a man who knew precisely what the track needed and what it didn’t. There is no showboating in the vocal, no guitar heroics, no moment where the singer steps forward to admire himself. The restraint is the artistry, and it is why the record still sounds fresh: nothing in it is trying to impress you, so nothing in it dates.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the song’s writers. Sapaugh and Austin were not stars, and they never became famous for this song the way Campbell did. But they wrote something that a superstar chose as one of his favorites, that carried an album to gold, and that has been sung back to audiences for more than half a century. Songwriters, especially in Nashville in those years, were the invisible people of the business, and “Try a Little Kindness” is, among other things, a tribute to their craft: a plain idea, said plainly, in a form so sturdy that a great singer could carry it anywhere. Campbell, who had spent years as an invisible session man himself before anyone knew his name, understood that kind of work better than most stars. He knew what it was to be the person in the background making the record work. Perhaps that is why he sang the song with such conviction. He had been the down-and-out, and he had been the helping hand, and he knew both sides of the exchange.
That is why the record still works, more than fifty-five years later, for people who have never heard of the charts it topped and never will. Everyone has had a day when a stranger’s small kindness changed the shape of it, and everyone has had a day when they could have offered one and didn’t. Campbell’s song does not guilt you about the second kind of day. It simply reminds you, in two minutes and twenty-three seconds, that the first kind is always available, and that it costs nothing to give. In a hard year, that was a radical thing to say quietly. In any year, it still is.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the chorus lifts. It is the sound of a man who had everything — fame, a television show, the best session players in Los Angeles — singing as if the most important thing he owned was a simple piece of advice, and offering it to anyone who would take it.