Wichita Lineman

“Wichita Lineman” is a song written by the American songwriter Jimmy Webb in 1968. It was first recorded by the American country music artist Glen Campbell with backing from members of The Wrecking Crew and has since been widely covered by other artists. It has been referred to as “the first existential country song”. Jimmy Webb stated in an interview for the BBC Radio 4 Mastertapes programme that the song was written in response to a phone call from Campbell for a “place” or “geographical” song to follow up “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”. Webb’s inspiration for the lyric came while driving through Washita County[a] in rural southwestern Oklahoma. At that time, many telephone companies were county-owned utilities, and their linemen were county employees. Heading westward on a straight road into the setting sun, Webb drove past a seemingly endless line of telephone poles, each looking exactly the same as the last. Then he noticed, in the distance, the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole.[7] He described it as “the picture of loneliness”. Webb then “put himself atop that pole and put that phone in his hand” as he considered what the lineman was saying into the receiver. It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song. I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere – working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’. Webb delivered a demo that he regarded and labelled as an incomplete version of the song, warning the producer and arranger Al De Lory that he had not completed a third verse or a middle eight. “When I heard it I cried,” Campbell said, “… because I was homesick.” De Lory similarly found inspiration in the opening line. His uncle had been a lineman in Kern County, California: “I could visualise my uncle up a pole in the middle of nowhere. I loved the song right away.” Webb’s concerns over his song’s shortcomings were addressed in the recording studio by adding a tremolo-infused Dano bass[11] melodic interlude performed by Campbell, who had first made his reputation in the music industry as a session guitarist with the group of uncredited Los Angeles backing musicians known today as “The Wrecking Crew”, many of whom played on the recording. One of them, bassist Carol Kaye, contributed the descending six-note intro. A second six-note bass lick improvised by Kaye was copied for strings by De Lory and used as a fill between the two rhyming couplets of each verse. All the orchestral arrangements are by De Lory, who evokes the phrase “singing in the wire” using high-pitched, ethereal violins to emulate the sonic vibrations commonly induced by wind blowing across small wires and conductors, making them whistle or whine like an aeolian harp. Similarly, he employs a repeating, monotonic ‘Morse code’ keyboard/flute motif[b] to mimic the electronic sounds a lineman might hear through a telephone earpiece attached to a long stretch of ‘raw’ telephone or telegraph line; that is, without typical line equalization and filtering (“I can hear you through the whine”). Webb was surprised to learn that Campbell had recorded the song: “A couple of weeks later I ran into [Campbell] somewhere and I said, ‘I guess you guys didn’t like the song’. ‘Oh, we cut that,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t done! I was just humming the last bit!’. ‘Well, it’s done now!'”[5] After listening to the test acetates of the studio recording that Campbell had with him, Webb contributed the overdub of evocative, reverberating electronic notes and open chords heard in the intro and fadeout, respectively, of the finished track, played on his Gulbransen electric organ.