A Phone Call and a Deadline
In the spring of 1968, Glen Campbell needed a hit, and he needed it fast. His reading of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” had carried him to the upper reaches of the country chart and won him two Grammy Awards, and Capitol Records wanted a follow-up in the same vein — another song with a place name in it, another small American geography lesson wrapped around a heartache. Campbell picked up the phone and called Webb directly with an urgent request: could he write another “geographical” song?
Webb, barely into his twenties and already one of the most sought-after songwriters in Los Angeles, understood the assignment. What he produced within hours would become one of the most celebrated recordings of the twentieth century — a song its own writer insisted was not finished, and has gone on insisting, cheerfully, for more than fifty years.
The Man on the Pole
Webb grew up in Oklahoma, and his inspiration reached back to drives through the high plains of the Oklahoma panhandle, in Washita County, where county-owned telephone companies employed their own linemen. On one such drive, with the summer heat rising off the road and the telephone poles materialising one by one out of the distance, he looked up and saw a lone lineman perched atop a pole, speaking into his handset. The image stayed with him: a blue-collar everyman suspended against an enormous sky, talking to someone far away.
When Campbell’s call came, Webb “put himself atop that pole,” telephone in hand, and imagined the lineman talking to his girlfriend. He set the song not in Oklahoma but in Wichita, Kansas, and built it around the simplest of declarations: “I am a lineman for the county, and I drive the main road.” The lyric braids the man’s working worries — searching in the sun for another overload, fearing that snow will bring down a stretch of wire — together with his longing for the woman he can hear “through the whine” of the line itself. It is a love song sung down a telephone wire by a man whose job is keeping other people’s connections alive.
“It Wasn’t Done!”
Working against Capitol’s deadline, Webb sent over a demo the same day he wrote the song, with an explicit warning to producer and arranger Al De Lory: this was an unfinished version. There was no third verse and no bridge — in the final section, Webb had simply hummed where the words should go. De Lory, whose own uncle had been a lineman in Kern County, California, loved it immediately. Campbell did too. “When I heard it I cried,” he later said, “because I was homesick.”
A couple of weeks passed with no word. When Webb next ran into Campbell, he assumed the song had been rejected: “I guess you guys didn’t like the song.” Campbell’s reply floored him. “Oh, we cut that.” Webb protested — “It wasn’t done! I was just humming the last bit!” — and Campbell shrugged the shrug of a man who had already pressed the record: “Well, it’s done now.”
Filling the Gap with a Bass Guitar
The recording, made at Capitol’s Hollywood studios on May 27, 1968, with orchestral overdubs added on August 14, is a masterclass in how musicians solve a songwriter’s problem. Where Webb’s missing third verse should have gone, Campbell — who had begun his career as one of Los Angeles’s most in-demand session guitarists — picked up a Danelectro bass and played a trembling, tremolo-soaked melodic interlude that says everything the unwritten verse might have said. Bassist Carol Kaye, a fellow member of the loose session fraternity known as the Wrecking Crew, contributed the famous descending six-note introduction, and another of her improvised bass figures was adapted by De Lory for the strings as a fill between couplets. Jim Gordon played drums, Al Casey added guitar, and De Lory himself played piano and arranged the orchestra.
De Lory’s arrangement is half the song’s magic. His high, ethereal violins imitate the “singing in the wire” — the eerie whistle wind makes as it passes over telephone lines, like an aeolian harp — while a repeating keyboard and flute figure mimics the electronic chirps and tones a lineman hears through a raw, unfiltered line. Webb, forgiven for his alarm, was invited in to overdub his Gulbransen electric organ, supplying the reverberating notes in the introduction and the open chords of the fade-out. Even the harmony refuses to settle: the verses shift between F major for the working details and an unexpectedly bright D major for the romantic ones, and as writer Allen Morrison has observed, the song never truly returns “home” to its tonic chord — the music stays suspended, like the man on the pole, yearning and unresolved.
A Song That Refuses to Settle
Listen closely and the record’s genius is architectural. Each verse divides into two halves that pull against each other. The first half is all business — the lineman drives the main road, searches in the sun for another overload, worries that a snowstorm will snap a southern stretch of wire. (Webb cheerfully conceded that “overloads” are a hazard of power lines, not telephone lines, and defended the error as poetic licence.) Then the harmony shifts, the strings swell, and the second half gives way to pure yearning: “And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.” Work and love, duty and desire, locked together in a two-minute loop — and because the music never resolves back to its home chord, neither does he. The lineman is, in the song’s most famous line, “still on the line”: connected, suspended, unfinished.
That unresolved quality became the song’s calling card among musicians. The BBC, spotlighting it in its documentary series Soul Music, described it as “one of those rare songs that seems somehow to exist in a world of its own — not just timeless but ultimately outside of modern music.” Real linemen adopted it as an anthem, and it has been used to open and close episodes of television dramas such as Ozark, where its prairie loneliness does the scene-setting all by itself.
Release and Chart Performance
The single arrived in the middle of an annus mirabilis. In 1968 alone Campbell released a run of albums and singles that made him, by some contemporary measures, the best-selling artist in America — Capitol pointed out, with only mild exaggeration, that he was outselling the Beatles. Released on October 26, 1968, as the title track of Campbell’s album Wichita Lineman — an album that itself reached number one on the country chart — the single became a genuine crossover phenomenon. It spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard country chart, an extraordinary six weeks atop the adult contemporary chart, and climbed to number three on the Hot 100, where it remained in the Top 100 for fifteen weeks. It topped both of Canada’s RPM singles charts, reached number seven in the United Kingdom, and was certified gold by the RIAA in January 1969. For a three-minute record about a county telephone repairman — a record with effectively two verses and a hummed ending — it was a staggering reach.
The Greatest Unfinished Song
Campbell himself never wavered about where it stood in his catalogue: he called it his favourite of all the songs he ever recorded, the one that felt most completely his. Posterity has been even kinder than the charts. “Wichita Lineman” has been called “the first existential country song,” and the endorsements border on the unreal: Bob Dylan considered it “the greatest song ever written,” British critic Stuart Maconie called it “the greatest pop song ever composed,” and Billy Joel has described it simply as “the perfect song.” The single was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000, and in 2019 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry. Rolling Stone placed it at number 206 on its 2021 list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In 2019, Dylan Jones devoted an entire book to it: The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World’s Greatest Unfinished Song.
The covers trace its reach across genres — Johnny Cash, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Kool & the Gang, José Feliciano, the Meters and jazz singer Cassandra Wilson all recorded it, R.E.M. championed it on stage for years, and Guns N’ Roses surprised arena crowds by performing it on their reunion tour in 2017, weeks after Campbell’s death that August. That autumn, Webb himself sang it at the CMA Awards alongside Little Big Town, in tribute to the friend who had recorded his song before it was finished.
Webb never did write the third verse. He didn’t need to. Campbell, homesick in a Hollywood studio, heard the whole of it in a half-finished demo — and the space where the missing verse belongs became the most eloquent part of the record: a working man, a wire humming in the wind, and a love that, like the song itself, never quite resolves.