The Wichita Lineman

Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song

Dylan Jones

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571353422
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

'It's just another song to me. I've written 1,000 of them and it's really just another one.' Jimmy Webb

'When I heard it I cried. It made me cry because I was homesick. It's just a masterfully written song.' Glen Campbell

The sound of 'Wichita Lineman' was the sound of ecstatic solitude, but then its hero was the quintessential loner. What a great metaphor he was: a man who needed a woman more than he actually wanted her.

Written in 1968 by Jimmy Webb, 'Wichita Lineman' is the first philosophical country song: a heartbreaking torch ballad still celebrated for its mercurial songwriting genius fifty years later. It was recorded by Glen Campbell in LA with a legendary group of musicians known as 'the Wrecking Crew', and something about the song's enigmatic mood seemed to capture the tensions in America at a moment of crisis. Fusing a dribble of bass, searing strings, tremolo guitar and Campbell's plaintive vocals, Webb's paean to the American West describes a telephone lineman's longing for an absent lover, who he hears 'singing in the wire' - and like all good love songs, it's an SOS from the heart.

Mixing close-listening, interviews and travelogue, Dylan Jones explores the legacy of a record that has entertained and haunted millions for over half a century. What is it about this song that continues to seduce listeners, and how did the parallel stories of Campbell and Webb - songwriters and recording artists from different ends of the spectrum - unfold in the decades following? Part biography, part work of musicological archaeology, The Wichita Lineman opens a window on to America in the late-twentieth century through the prism of a song that has been covered by myriad artists in the intervening decades.

'Americana in the truest sense: evocative and real.' Bob Stanley

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface: My Father’s Place
• Introduction: The Sleeper
• 1 Becoming Glen Campbell
• 2 Becoming Jimmy Webb
• 3 The Harmonising of America
• 4 The Heart of America
• 5 The Lineman’s Afterlife
• 6 The Beautiful Mundane
• 7 County Music
• 8 Still on the Line
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Image Credits
• About the Author
• Also by the Author
• Copyright