There’s a theatre, the Emerald, under the arch at the north end of Waterloo Bridge in London. On the dinner menu are cod loin and a “Lady Luck” cocktail flavoured with Beefeater gin. The burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese is performing on a hot night in July: tickets start at £45 for a restricted-view seat. But at 6.30pm, there are only 12 diners cutting into their heritage tomato tartare, as a young woman with cropped white-blonde hair weaves in and out of the tables, greeting people: she could be front of house.
She reappears on the small stage in a basque and cowboy boots, and sings with the airiness of Dolly Parton. There is a lightness of touch, each tune capped off with a sing-song “thank you!”. No personal detail, no backstory. When she picks a little flourish on her guitar, she tilts her head back and purses her lips in a way that seems familiar.
It is not clear why the daughter of one of the biggest country stars in history is living quietly on the river in London without management, plugging away to tiny audiences, apparently unbothered as to whether her new album, Goodnight Nashville, gets much press. When Ashley Campbell cut off her long blonde hair, Glen Campbell’s fans were angry: his youngest child belonged to them.
“I’ve had a slew of internet stalkers,” she says matter-of-factly, sipping a pint of Aspall cider in a pub the day after the burlesque gig. The stalkers fall into two camps: the scammers, “who pretend to be me and start having conversations with vulnerable fans. Then they ask the fan for money. This has happened multiple times. The problem is, the more dangerous fans then think I’m the bad guy for allowing it to happen.”
Then, there are the people who want to marry her. One sent her an engagement ring and $1,000 in cash. “Older, lonely men,” she observes. “They think, because of my dad, who he was, and the fact that he was openly Christian – that I’m this really pure girl. Any time I do anything that might contradict that, I get flak.”
She asks me not to say where she lives. Although she is guarded, she is strangely non-media-trained for a Nashville musician. “That’s one relief about living in the UK – not as many guns.”
Glen Campbell, whose recording career lasted 60 years, and whose best known hit was “Wichita Lineman”, had nine children and four wives. The first child was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1956, when he was 17 and playing in his Uncle Boo’s western swing band. The last – sitting in front of me – was born 30 years later, when he was living in Phoenix, Arizona, a place where, in Ashley’s words, you can see the heat.
“My dad doesn’t like being cold,” she offers. Although he died in 2017 after a much-publicised decline with Alzheimer’s disease, Ashley often talks about him in the present tense. “My mom wanted to move to Phoenix because she didn’t want him to be tempted by his friends in LA, because he had a severe alcohol and drug problem.”
Kimberly Woolen, Ashley’s mother, met Glen Campbell, then 45 and deep into whiskey and cocaine, on a blind date when she was 22 years old. The following winter, Campbell was baptised in a creek in Arkansas, near where he was raised with his 11 brothers and sisters, and he was born again. Gospel albums followed, as did two more kids and Ashley. “I’m glad she stuck with him,” she says of her mother.
Campbell’s touring career lasted 45 years. When he wasn’t on tour, he enjoyed a lot of golf. A virtuoso guitarist, he didn’t play much music around the house: “Not as much as you would think. We didn’t have a family jam.” He would sometimes take Ashley to a fishing pond near their cabin house in Flagstaff – she had her own little pole with pictures of Donald Duck on the reel. “Since most of my dad’s life was music and golfing, it felt special to see the Arkansas country boy come out,” she says. “We caught some brown trout and cooked it for dinner.”
For many years it was hard to tell that something was wrong with her father – he was eccentric, and he was used to having things done for him. But one day, he asked where his golf clubs were, and when they told him they were in the garage, he said, “What’s the garage?”
Around this time Ashley was a drama student at Pepperdine University in Malibu: she’d only learned to play the banjo for a part in a play. In 2009, aged 23, she was drafted into her father’s long-serving touring band on vocals and banjo, alongside two of her brothers, Shannon and Caledonia, and became responsible for looking out for him on stage as his illness took over.
Those final years, if you saw his farewell gigs, were a high-wire act. Campbell’s artistic seriousness had always been offset by his on-stage jokes and Donald Duck impressions, but now he could lose his thread and get cantankerous. Then he’d click back into his musical self, his fingers working the guitar like a waterwheel, his face an expression of blissed-out ease. He didn’t have to warm up once, Ashley recalls. Long after he could no longer speak, he could still play. “I would bring my bluegrass friends over to have jams at the house, so that he could engage and join in. He loved it.”
She knows she has his mannerisms. She also has his intuition for harmony. But she doesn’t have his perfect pitch. Ashley Campbell is a classic country musician at heart – a fan of full-on Americana, as she puts it: “Beautiful, intricate, instrument-heavy music.” Her godfather is the Seventies banjo whizz Carl Jackson: he duets on a new track called “Carl and Ashley’s Breakdown”. Her lyrics have that elliptical quality unique to country writing, some of them functioning like extended jokes – such as a new track written in the time-honoured “cheating song” tradition, “POS” (Piece of Shit).
“I’ve been going through quite a metamorphosis, if you would,” she says. “I went through the Nashville machine and got caught up making music for the purpose of radio, and it made me utterly miserable. Then the label let me go and it was a breath of fresh air.”
In Phoenix, the Campbell family belonged to a big Baptist congregation, but in the early 1990s her parents converted to Messianic Judaism: they travelled to Israel, funded study groups and lent out Glen’s home recording studio to the local branch of the Messianic organisation First Fruits of Zion, for the creation of Torah Club audio.
“By the time I decided to leave the Church, I was already mentally gone,” she says. “When they converted to Judaism, we had to eat kosher and we went to synagogues, and it didn’t vibe with me – though I loved the prayers to music in Hebrew.” At high school, she “got back into a little churchiness” through a musical-theatre youth group. “I thought that I felt it all, you know? But then I attended their megachurch – thousands and thousands of people, like the Grand Ole Opry. The pastor started speaking in tongues, and it completely turned me off.”
When she left to study in California, her parents followed her there from Phoenix. After her father’s diagnosis, she helped her mother pick out a new house in Nashville and the whole family moved in to care for him “for a long time, all of us together”. She was 30 when he passed away.
Campbell’s body was driven quickly from Nashville to Arkansas to be buried within the 24 hours required by Jewish law. In the years after his death, a classic country-dynasty feud unfolded as it was revealed that three of his children had been written out of his will. But his youngest daughter distances herself from the legacy and the money. “Contrary to Google, we are not worth $50m. My dad didn’t write his own songs.”
She moved to London two years ago, with her miniature Schnauzer, Frodo, via Paris and the “Chunnel”, accompanied by her boyfriend and creative partner Thor Jensen. Jensen is a New Yorker of Norwegian descent who is one of a long line of Thors. She met him in Nashville, when she decided to seek out a teacher of Gypsy jazz guitar: her dad could play like Django Reinhardt. She asked Thor to go to a St Vincent concert as friends.
A few months after the pair arrived in this country, they did some television in Kent in promotion of their Campbell/Jensen project. “We sat on the couch, there’s a screen behind us, and there’s just a huge picture of me and my dad, with me kind of blurry and my dad in the forefront,” she says. “Then the lady asks, ‘So, do you ever feel like you’re in your father’s shadow?’ I just looked up and pointed.”
A strange indie life is emerging in the city today. “We are a boots-on-the-ground operation,” she says. “I have to take all kinds of music jobs to make the rent. Who knows what doing this Dita von Teese thing could lead to? I’m stripping back, building from the bottom. I’ve always felt like the further I got from my family, the more I knew myself.”
A few days later, I saw her launch her new album at the Pheasantry on King’s Road in Chelsea. Once a drinking spot for Humphrey Bogart, later a tiny stage for Eric Clapton and Queen, it is now a Pizza Express – with a full house of diners this time and an English atmosphere of hushed respect. When Ashley Campbell eventually revealed her country lineage on stage, there were no whoops of recognition: “These days, most people don’t know who I am,” she’d told me. After “Gentle on My Mind”, the one Glen Campbell song she performs, someone said, “Your dad would be proud,” and there was that sing-song “thank you!” again.
Ashley Campbell’s latest album is “Goodnight Nashville” (Whistle Stop Records). She plays Folk in the Park Festival in Sutton on Saturday 16 August
[See also: It’s time for angry left populism]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025