My mother loved Glen Campbell's music. Since her death in 2011 – also from Alzheimer's disease – whenever I've craved the sound of her voice I'll listen to some Campbell country music classics for comfort. Immediately, his songs transport me back to my childhood when his voice was – like hers – the soundtrack in our family home. I learnt American geography thanks to Glen.

"Where's Wichita/Phoenix/Galveston?" I'd ask after hearing him croon about those places.

"Look it up in the World Book Encyclopaedia," would come her refrain, which in Sydney in the 1970s was the standard pre-Google parental response. 

My father – who didn't share her fandom – happily let me accompany her to see Campbell sing at the Hordern Pavilion in 1974, with tickets she'd won on the 2UE Bob Rogers radio show. It was my first concert. I still remember sitting so close in the front row we could almost reach out and touch his spectacular sideburns. We watched in awe as his fast fingers slid up and down his guitar moving in unison with his fabulous fringed shirt.

Like my Mum, I knew all the words to all his songs, thanks to family car trips where we'd listen on the portable cassette player we carried in the car. Rather they were songwriter Jimmy Webb's words – or a lot of them were – but Mum marvelled at them as if they contained the secret to life. Long before Rhinestone Cowboy became his signature hit in 1975, we would sob together whenever True Grit, the movie he starred in with John Wayne came on the television. The title track, where Campbell sang, "One day little girl the sadness will leave your face", was nominated for an Oscar for best song.

"He's got a beautiful voice," she'd say. "But it's the words that are magic."

At the time I thought they were cheesy – too cute like his dimpled chin – and straight from a Hollywood western movie set. It's only since listening to him extensively since her death I've come to agree. There is not a human condition Cambell's country music didn't cover. 

"And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time," as the Wichita lineman sang. Can you get a better description of the road to success than Rhinestone Cowboy's "Nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain", and "There's a load of compromising on the road to my horizon". To those who scoff I'd say, "Try a little kindness, then you'll overlook the blindness, of the narrow-minded people on their narrow-minded streets".

Sure he was flawed – your usual rock-star flaws – alcohol, drugs, womanising with multiple wives and children – but those words (even if someone else wrote them coupled with the sincerity of his delivery) live on like a great Tennyson poem.

Like many I was saddened to hear he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2011, the year my mother died of it. I was astounded and full of admiration to see he continued to perform and tour – despite forgetting the words and his family. The tragedy of losing words when for so long they have been your stock-in-trade. And today I was saddened to hear of his death, in the way my mother would have been. But, Glen, it's that voice and those words that "keeps you in the backroads by the rivers of my memory, that keeps you ever gentle on my mind".

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