Bottom line: While linemen still exist, fewer and fewer people know who they are and what they do — they work on utility poles across the country. Judging by the lyrics, the Wichita Lineman happens to be working phone poles. (“I hear you singin’ in the wire, I can hear you through the whine”) while thinking of his love, who is far away.
The song, written by a then 21-year-old Jimmy Webb, was inspired by one such person working in Oklahoma: “I have a very specific image of a guy I saw working up on the wires out in the Oklahoma panhandle 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.'”
And how did Webb come up with “I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time” — the most romantic lines ever written? He said: “I was trying to express the inexpressible, the yearning that goes beyond yearning, that goes into another dimension … It was a moment where the language failed me really; there was no way for me to pour this out, except to go into an abstract realm, and that was the line that popped out.”
