Glen Camp­bell start­ed his career as a gui­tarist with the Wreck­ing Crew, that loose col­lec­tive of ses­sion musi­cians that con­tributed to thou­sands of stu­dio record­ings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de fac­to house band). The list of artists whose record­ings he played on is a who’s who of the Amer­i­can six­ties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a suc­cess­ful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a ver­sion of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Uni­ver­sal Sol­dier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gen­tle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

That last song was writ­ten by Jim­my Webb and, buoyed by its suc­cess, Glen Camp­bell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any oth­er “geo­graph­i­cal” songs to fol­low it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one any­way: Wichi­ta Line­man. Web­b’s inspi­ra­tion for the lyrics came while dri­ving west­ward on a straight road through Washita Coun­ty in rur­al south-west­ern Okla­homa. Dri­ving past a seem­ing­ly end­less line of tele­phone poles, he noticed in the dis­tance the sil­hou­ette of a soli­tary line­man atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:

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 what he regard­ed and labelled as an incom­plete ver­sion of the song, warn­ing that he had not com­plet­ed a third verse or a mid­dle eight. Camp­bell soon nailed the lack of a mid­dle eight sec­tion with some of his Wreck­ing Crew pals (adding a bari­tone gui­tar inter­lude as well as the orches­tral­ly arranged out­ro known to British Radio 2 lis­ten­ers as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was sur­prised to hear that Camp­bell had record­ed the song when he ran into him:

‘I guess you guys did­n’t like the song.’

‘Oh, we cut that’

‘But it was­n’t done! I was just hum­ming the last bit!’

‘Well, it’s done now!’ ”

And what a love­ly song it was, too!