The Wichita Lineman

Its just another song to me. Ive written 1,000 of them and its really just another one. Jimmy Webb

When I heard it I cried. It made me cry because I was homesick. Its 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 songs enigmatic mood seemed to capture the tensions in America at a moment of crisis. Fusing a dribble of bass, searing strings, tremolo guitar and Campbells plaintive vocals, Webbs paean to the American West describes a telephone linemans longing for an absent lover, who he hears singing in the wire - and like all good love songs, its 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, TheWichita 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