Wichita lineman - dylan jones

Mixing close-listening, interviews and travelogue, Jones explores the legacy of a record that has entertained, perplexed, and haunted millions for over half a century.

Dylan Jones luminous excavation of Jimmy Webbs song Wichita Lineman offers a portal into a defining moment of American cultural history.

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.

Here, deep in American Arcadia, was a man in deep existential crisis.

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 50 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 of America at a moment of unprecedented crisis.

Fusing a dribble of bass, searing strings, tremolo guitar and Glen 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, perplexed and haunted millions for over half a century.

What is it about this song that continues to fascinate and 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 the songs success? Part biography, part work of musicological archaeology, The Wichita Lineman opens a window onto America in the late twentieth century through the prism of a song that has been covered by myriad artists in the intervening decades.