"Wichita Lineman" is a 1968 song written by Jimmy Webb for American country music artist Glen Campbell, who recorded it backed by members of the Wrecking Crew. Widely covered by other artists, it has been called "the first existential country song".

In 2021, Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" ranked "Wichita Lineman" at number 206. Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan considered it "the greatest song ever written" and British music journalist Stuart Maconie called it "the greatest pop song ever composed."

Webb wrote "Wichita Lineman" in response to Campbell's urgent phone request for a "place"-based or "geographical" song to follow up "By the Time I Get to Phoenix". His lyrical inspiration came while driving through the high plains of the Oklahoma panhandle past a long line of telephone poles, on one of which perched a lineman speaking into his handset. Webb "put himself atop that pole" with the phone in his hand as he imagined the lineman talking to his girlfriend. Despite its real-life roots lying elsewhere, Webb set his song in Wichita, Kansas.

Within hours of Campbell's plea from the recording studio, Webb delivered a demo that he regarded and labeled as an unfinished version of the song, warning producer/arranger Al De Lory that he had not completed a third verse or a bridge. "When I heard it I cried," Campbell said, "... because I was homesick." De Lory similarly found inspiration in the opening line. His uncle had been a lineman in Kern County, California: "I could visualize my uncle up a pole in the middle of nowhere. I loved the song right away."

Webb's concerns over his song's shortcomings were quickly addressed in the studio by adding a tremolo-infused Dano bass melodic interlude performed by Campbell, who had first made his reputation in the music industry as a session guitarist with the prolific but uncredited group of Los Angeles backing musicians known today as the Wrecking Crew, many of whom played on the recording. One of them, bassist Carol Kaye, contributed the descending six-note intro. A second six-note bass lick improvised by Kaye was copied for strings by De Lory and used as a fill between the two rhyming couplets of each verse.

All the orchestral arrangements are by De Lory, who evokes the phrase "singing in the wire" using high-pitched, ethereal violins to emulate the sonic vibrations commonly induced by wind blowing across small wires and conductors, making them whistle or resonate like an aeolian harp. Similarly, he employs a repeating, monotonic 'Morse code' keyboard/flute motif to mimic the electronic sounds a lineman might hear through a telephone earpiece attached to a long stretch of 'raw' telephone or telegraph line; that is, without typical line equalization and filtering: "I can hear you through the whine."

Webb was surprised to learn that Campbell had recorded his song: "A couple of weeks later I ran into [Campbell] somewhere and I said, 'I guess you guys didn't like the song.' 'Oh, we cut that,' he said. 'It wasn't done! I was just humming the last bit!' 'Well, it's done now!'" After listening to the test acetates of the studio recording that Campbell had with him, Webb contributed the overdub of evocative, reverberating electronic notes and open chords heard in the intro and fadeout, respectively, of the finished track, played on his Gulbransen electric organ.

 —Jimmy Webb