Glen Campbell Cried When He First Heard His Future Hit, and the Session Musicians Playing on It Felt the Same Way

Chart positions and sales numbers can be decent indicators of whether a song is good, but as Glen Campbell and the session musicians who played on his hit records knew all too well, our bodies can tell us when a song is a hit long before Billboard does. Indeed, one of the most rewarding things about music is the visceral reactions we can get from listening to it. Goosebumps, hair standing on end, an emotional tear or two—Campbell experienced all of these when listening to his future hit, written by Jimmy Webb, for the first time.

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Webb and Campbell’s first collaboration, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, was a massive success. Eager to recreate the sales of this hit record, Campbell asked Webb for another geographical song. Webb responded with “Wichita Lineman”, a song that immediately moved Campbell.

“When I first heard it, I cried,” Campbell later recalled, per Dylan Jones’ The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World’s Greatest Unfinished Song. “It made me cry because I was homesick. Every hair follicle stood up on my body. It’s a masterfully written song.”

The narrator of the song is a lineman out in the vast expanse of the Kansas countryside, singing to a faraway lover whom he can “hear singing in the wire.” With lines like, “And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time,” Webb elevates this story of a blue-collar laborer into an incredibly moving love song, which Billy Joel described as finding beauty in the mundane.

Glen Campbell Wasn’t the Only One Moved by This No. 1 Hit

When Glen Campbell first heard his future No. 1 hit, “Wichita Lineman”, Jimmy Webb’s imagery of linemen scaling telephone poles alongside a quiet highway brought Campbell back to his childhood in rural Arkansas. A long way from home, “Wichita Lineman” was a way for Campbell to reconnect with a slower existence than the one he was experiencing in Hollywood. But Campbell, whom the Wrecking Crew affectionately nicknamed “The Hillbilly,” wasn’t the only one who had an emotional reaction.

Carol Kaye, the iconic bassist of the Wrecking Crew responsible for the song’s instantly recognizable descending melody, felt her body respond to the song long before industry executives classified it as a hit. “I was keeping it very simple,” she recalled in Dylan Jones’ retrospective book. “When you first get the tune rolling, you want to stay in the background as much as possible. Then when he starts singing, the hair kind of stood up on my arms. I thought, ‘This is deep.’”

She added, “I heard ‘Wichita Lineman’ at a drugstore one time, and it just brought tears to my eyes. That tune meant a lot to me.”

Like Campbell, orchestral arranger and producer Al DeLory also felt an instant familial connection to the song. DeLory’s uncle worked as a lineman in California. “As soon as I heard that opening line, I could visualize my uncle up a pole in the middle of nowhere. I loved the song right away,” DeLory said, per the BBC.

With the song peaking at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs and Adult Contemporary charts (and a still-impressive No. 3 on the Hot 100), it’s clear the rest of us did, too.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images