My wife and I enjoy watching The Voice on NBC. One of the contestants, a vocal trio, chose to sing Wichita Lineman. For convenience, I have printed the lyrics below.
I am a lineman for the county
And I drive the main road
Searchin’ in the sun for another overload
I hear you singing in the wire
I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita lineman
Is still on the line
removed excess lyrics, fair use issue
After the performance, I told my wife that I didn’t like the way they sang the song because I have never thought of Wichita Lineman as being a sad song.
This led to a brief conversation where my wife expressed surprise and asked what my interpretation of the song was. I told her that I think the lineman singing the song is proud. He has a difficult job, but it is important and he is proud of his work.
My wife interprets the lineman as missing his wife and wanting to get back home – a sad song. I think she is exactly right except that the lineman recognizes the sacrifice he makes, but the snow will pull the lines down. He has to go. Wichita County needs him and there is no one else.
What do y’all think of this iconic song?
(Full disclosure: I have long had a problem balancing home and work life. I have retired from my original career and have embarked on a new adventure. The sacrifice of being away from home a lot and working unpredictable hours has been a source of some friction between me and the missus lately. In other words, the sentiments in Wichita Lineman have been a topic of discussion around here long before Monday’s episode of The Voice.)
I want to add that it is this line that floors me, especially given the strain in my marriage caused partly by work v. home concerns. He needs to be home. He wants to be home. He wants her for all time – more than anything. Webb wrote this line TWICE emphasizing that the lineman recognizes his sacrifice – and his wife’s sacrifice.
It’s always struck me as a sad song – as you note, he’s proud of his job, and feels a sense of duty to do his job, but he also recognizes that it takes him away from his love and the rest of his life.
I never thought of it as a sad song. I saw it as a love song. But then, I never thought he was necessarily proud of his work, more that the demands of his important work and his dedication necessitated him being away, as many careers do. He misses the woman he loves and thinks about her constantly. He can’t wait to get home to her. There’s nothing that says she resents his job.
That said, I guess if I were hurt and angry that my spouse put so much time into his job, I’d probably interpret the song that way. I never minded when my husband put in long hours and was frequently gone on fishing trips, but maybe I was an outlier.
Who’s to say the song is about the lineman missing his wife in a still-active relationship? I think I’ve kind of always interpreted it as a failed marriage or a broken relationship where he misses her and throws himself into his work to try to get his mind off it (clearly not working). So with that interpretation, yes, a sad song.
My headcanon — which you could fault both for being overly-literal, and for reading too much into it — is that, while on the job, he patched in to make sure the line was working, at which point he heard her voice; and he then remained on the line, listening to what she was saying while thinking things over…
Whereas, 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.”
Songfacts : Exactly.
Jimmy : But he could have been talking to his girlfriend - I’m a romantic, so that’s where I go.
I would characterize this song as “poignant” and “thought-provoking”, similar to another Jimmy Webb song, “Galveston”.
It is also worth noting that the song is incomplete–Webb planned to write a third, closing verse, but Glen Campbell recorded it before Webb could finish it.
He certainly had a few geographic hits, didn’t he? “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”
The geographic location here is a bit iffy. He mentions that he drew the inspiration in the Oklahoma Panhandle, but there is no Wichita County in Oklahoma. Not far from there is Wichita County TX, which contains the city Wichita Falls, TX and is famous for tornadoes as well as the world’s littlest skyscraper.. There’s also a Wichita County in Kansas, but the city of Wichita is in Sedgwick County.
I always assumed Wichita KS and he’s working for the county (Sedgwick).
The singer misses his wife or girlfriend or whatever…for all we know he’s gay. But it’s absence by design.
My dad used to drive trucks and he loved it. He’d be gone weeks at a time while mom raised the kids. I think he was a lone wolf. Mom wanted babies, ok. Needed money to run the house, ok. But he could only handle so much togetherness and that was the deal they settled on. I could see someone like dad having to reassure mom that he did love her but he needed to do the job etc. He cared, didn’t want to lose her, but couldn’t give her everything she wanted, either.
The lines “I know I need a small vacation but it don’t look like rain/And if it snows that stretch down south won’t ever stand the strain” sound like rationalizing to me. “If the weather gets bad, I may have to take off (rain). Unless I can’t (snow).”
Interesting. I was trained as an electrician and a lineman in that field is someone who works on high-voltage lines and secondary lines (the ones that feed to your home). So I assumed that’s who the song was about. Also, the line in the song about “searching in the sun for another overload” also made me think of a power lineman. It didn’t occur to me that it could be a telephone lineman (also a legitimate description), but now I see how that interpretation could be valid.
“Searching for an overload” suggests electrical line and what Webb and many others call “telephone poles” are more likely to be electrical line poles that have telephone lines “piggybacking” on the poles. But hey, as Webb said, he’s writing songs, not journalism.
In reading the Wikipedia article about the song, the most surprising part of it to me is that Guns 'N Roses covered it during one of their tours in 2017.
For all of you who are trying to make some kind of factual sense out of the words and meaning of the song, I would like to refer you to another Jimmy Webb song, McArthur Park. Partial lyrics:
“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh no!”
Jimmy writes songs, not documentaries. They can mean whatever you want them to mean.
Yeah, well he wrote it about the end of his love affair, as quoted below, so it was auto biographical in nature:
Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. … Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.
As a side note, the same relationship is what inspired him to write “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”.
Back to my complaint that LA writers never look at a map. You don’t leave LA to Albuquerque, Oklahoma and points east by going through Phoenix. You get on I15 in San Berdoo and hit I40 and don’t get off.
Besides Phoenix to Albuquerque is 8 hours on a good day, longer in the 60s. She’ll be home, not at lunch.
But I still like Jimmy Webb songs. Even the much-maligned MacArthur Park.
