in Nashville. AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.

Mr. Campbell was 4 when an uncle bought him a $5 mail-order guitar from a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue. He taught himself to play as an escape from sharecropping, explaining, “Picking a guitar was a lot easier than picking cotton.” He grew to admire the Belgian-born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, whom he called “the most awesome player I ever heard.”

Without any formal training, Mr. Campbell became by the early 1960s part of the Wrecking Crew of Los Angeles, studio musicians who were known for their versatility and skill.

He played rhythm guitar on more than 500 jazz, pop, rock and country records, backing entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard and the Beach Boys.recalling how he trashed hotel suites and got into other messes.

There was a time, he said, that he boarded a plane, got into a seating dispute with an Indonesian government official and drunkenly told the man he would “call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta.”

His most-chronicled escapade was his tumultuous relationship with country and pop singer Tanya Tucker, who projected a wildcat, man-eating persona and, at 22, was half Mr. Campbell’s age.

They performed the national anthem together at the 1980 Republican National Convention. The next year, their tawdry row outside a hotel near Shreveport, La., attracted the attention of local authorities and then the media. It was not the last time their differences surfaced loudly and publicly.

In 1982, Mr. Campbell wed his fourth wife.