1968Released
3:06

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Wichita Lineman - Remastered 2001. By Songfacts®.

This was written by Jimmy Webb, who also wrote Campbell's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Galveston." He was driving along the Kansas-Oklahoma border when he saw a lonesome telephone lineman working atop a telephone pole. This gave him the idea for the song.

In a Songfacts interview with Jimmy Webb, he explained how he puts himself into the shoes of the subjects of this songs. Said Webb: "I've never worked with high-tension wires or anything like that. My characters were all ordinary guys. They were all blue-collar guys who did ordinary jobs. As Billy Joel likes to say, which is pretty accurate, he said, 'They're ordinary people thinking extraordinary thoughts.' I always appreciated that comment, because I thought it was very close to what I was doing or what I was trying to do. And they came from ordinary towns. They came from places like Galveston and Wichita and places like that. No, I never worked for the phone company. But then, I'm not a journalist. I'm not Woody Guthrie. I'm a songwriter and I can write about anything I want to. I feel that you should know something about what you're doing and you should have an image, and I have a very specific image of a guy I saw working up on the wires out in the Oklahoma panhandle one time with a telephone in his hand talking to somebody. And this exquisite aesthetic balance of all these telephone poles just decreasing in size as they got further and further away from the viewer - that being me - and as I passed him, he began to diminish in size. The country is so flat, it was like this one quick snapshot of this guy rigged up on a pole with this telephone in his hand. And this song came about, really, from wondering what that was like, what it would be like to be working up on a telephone pole and what would you be talking about? Was he talking to his girlfriend? Probably just doing one of those checks where they called up and said, 'Mile marker 46,' you know. 'Everything's working so far.'"

While recording the song in the studio, Campbell felt something was out of place. He couldn't capture the same feel of the song he'd felt when Webb sang the demo as he accompanied himself on his Hammond organ. Campbell decided that the only way to get the right vibe was to add Webb's Hammond organ to the song's instrumentation.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Wichita Lineman - Remastered 2001.
FKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
172BPM

Album

The album Wichita Lineman - Remastered 2001 is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Wichita Lineman - Remastered 2001.
Capitol Nashville
© 2001 Capitol Records Nashville
℗ 2001 Capitol Records Nashville

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