Pop Song 265 of 500 'Wichita Lineman' Glen Campbell by Jimmy Webb 1968

Pop Song 265 of 500 'Wichita Lineman' Glen Campbell by Jimmy Webb 1968

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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. 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 visualize my uncle up a pole in the middle of nowhere. I loved the song right away.

Lyrics that are loose translations of, or inspired by, Webb's song have been written in at least two other languages: German and Finnish.