Glen Campbell got famous singin’ ‘bout the Wichita lineman. A Lonely Guy out on the road,achin’ for his lover. Okay, I get it–( well, part of it)
But there’s one thing I don’t get:
Just what is a lineman?
And why is he “a lineman for the county”?
If he’s working on phone/electric lines, then he’d be a unionized employee of a private company, like Ma Bell, or Consolidated Kansas Energy, Inc.
And if he works for the county, then presumably his work is confined to the limits of the county borders., so he’s not gonna be far away from home for weeks on end, like a cowboy or a long-distance trucker, or a soldier, or any of the other Lonely-Guy-Away-from-home professions that get sung about .
So what’s the poor lineman doin’ out there on those lines?
Or it it just poetic license, 'cause its harder to sing poignant rhymes about "I am a lineman for a publicly traded corporation, who can’t go home for another couple hours ".?
Well it is Witchita. Maybe they got hit by a whole bunch of tornados, which ripped the infrastructure to hell. Then the state applied for federal disaster relief, which it recieved and granted to the affected counties to apportion. In several areas(I don’t know crap about Witchita) All public utilities are owned by the Government. So the county had to hire a bunch of emergency workers to get all the lines back up to the rural areas, and our title character was a hired gun to fix them. So he has been working 16 hour days out on lonely empty roads to the the lines back up.
Back during the New Deal, laying electric lines was part of the Rural Electrification Administration’s mission and was administered by the government. More than 98 percent of the United States’ farms were equipped with electric power under the program.
I like Wolfman’s explanation. 'Cept that see, he does only work a few hours a day (say 12, with two 2 hour breaks) but he’s so damn in love he misses his partner constantly.
This song, btw, is great for singing at the top of your lungs when you are in a car by yourself.
OT, I was listening to the country show on radio 2 last night and they were talking about Glen Campbell being inducted into the country hall of fame. Glen Campbell into the country HOF??? I though this would have happened twenty years ago, minimum. Maybe the hall of fame is a new thing in country music? Anyone have the SD?
The first three people into the CMHOF were Jimmy Rogers, Fred Rose (of Acuff-Rose) and Hank Williams in 1961.
20 years ago Glen Campbell may not have been considered “Country enough” by the good-ol-boys who ran the show. These days he seems downright Country compared to a lot of the current acts.
