Love, Work, and Jimmy Webb’s ‘Wichita Lineman’

Jimmy Webb wrote “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Campbell following Campbell’s hit “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Little did he know he would get a masterpiece. (Tad Denson/Shutterstock)

Life is hard. It’s also beautiful. It’s made of love and work and more love. And even though you know it’s going to end, you also know a part of it will somehow go on.

I didn’t get the theme above from a wise teacher or an ancient book. I got it from a 1968 pop-country song that has been called “the greatest song ever written.”

Jimmy Webb wrote “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Campbell following Campbell’s hit cover of Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Campbell wanted “song about a town.” Little did he know that he would get a masterpiece.

The singer and the songwriter had never met, but “Phoenix” was such a colossal hit that Campbell was sure Webb could pull it off a second time. Webb was a 21-year-old wunderkind whose vibrant “Up, Up and Away” had helped launch a group called “The Fifth Dimension” and whose other oeuvre included the cinematic orchestral pop of “MacArthur Park.”

Country singer Glen Campbell, shown here performing in 2004, had a big hit in "Wichita Lineman" by Jimmy Webb. (Rusty Russell/Getty Images)

In answer to Campbell’s request, Webb dug into a memory he had of traveling through Kansas: “By the Kansas border the terrain absolutely flattens out. … It goes on that way for about fifty miles,” he told the BBC. “In the heat of summer, the heat rises off the road in this shimmering mirage and the telephone poles gradually materialize out of this far distant perspective and they become large and rush towards you.”

 “As it happened, I suddenly looked up at one of these telephone poles and there was a man on top talking on the telephone and he was gone very quickly and I had another 25 miles of solitude to meditate on this apparition. It was a splendidly vivid cinematic image that I lifted out of my memory when I was writing this song about an ordinary guy, a working-class type of dude.”

Words, Plain and Otherwise

Webb’s sparse lyric is made of 93 simple words:

I am a lineman for the county And I drive the main roads Searching in the sun for another overload I hear you singing in the wires I can hear you through the whine And the Wichita lineman Is still on the line

I know I need a small vacation But it don’t look like rain And if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain And I need you more than want you And I want you for all time And the Wichita lineman Is still on the line

It’s a simple enough situation: A lineman, a man working to install and repair power lines, is working hard with little opportunity for time off, let alone a vacation. His work is important and meaningful.

But something else, someone else, is also present as he thinks about “that stretch down south”: the woman he loves, the love that somehow makes the work meaningful. And though he is “still on the line,” it is she who shines in his heart all the while.

In a sense, it is an unremarkable lyric, save for one thing: The language of the lineman’s work and that of his thoughts of love are in striking contrast. “But it don’t look like rain” could be said by a real lineman.

But “And I need you more than want you/ And I want you for all time”? Probably not, unless the lineman is a part-time poet. We use everyday language for everyday events. But the language of the heart is spoken by the heart alone. We don’t say the words, we feel them. And when a great songwriter catches them in music, we can sing them.

It is the music, more than the words, that makes this song what it is. The lyrics give us the premise. The music paints the emotional condition. How does it do that?

Jimmy Webb, shown here in Oslo in 2016, wrote “Wichita Lineman” for Glen Campbell, and it became a big hit for the singer. (Tore Sætre/CC BY-SA 4.0)

How Music Works Its Magic

The opening key is F major. The song continues in F through the words “another overload,” and then switches to a surprising yet surprisingly right D major with “I hear you singing in the wires.” Back to F for “I know I need a small vacation,” and then to D again with those amazing words “And I need you more than want you.”

The key change not only underlines the difference of the work language from the love language, but it also supplies a relationship not heard in most pop songs—a fresh progression from one key to another only distantly connected, a tonal picture of the physical distance between the lineman and his woman, a picture both of his loneliness and the depth of his love.

I don’t know if I agree about “Wichita Lineman” being the greatest song ever. A ranking like that begs to be narrowed a bit. The “best song” of what genre, what age, which country, what style? But if a single song were to be named No. 1, the nominees would certainly include one or two by Schubert, “Shenandoah,” and Jimmy Webb’s magical paean to the permanence of our impermanent lives.