This Is The Greatest Song Of All Time, According To Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an icon of the 20th century. He is perhaps the world's most celebrated songwriter, and the only one to win the Nobel Prize in literature, which he received in 2016. And as well as writing songs himself, he is no slouch when it comes to his knowledge and understanding of popular music and its rich history. This was evident in the 2000s, when he spent three years curating three seasons of "Theme Time Radio Hour." The radio show highlighted his favorite songs from across the decades, focusing on a particular theme in each episode (for example "Telephone" or the word "Hello"). In 2022, he published "The Philosophy of Modern Song," in which he analysed 66 songs to uncover what he believed made the tunes tick.

But neither the radio show nor the book feature what Bob Dylan has claimed is the "best song ever written": "Wichita Lineman." Written by songwriter Jimmy Webb, country star Glen Campbell made it into a No. 3 U.S. Billboard hit in 1968. Though it didn't top the charts, the song has remained a classic down the decades. Such continued interest is demonstrated by the 2019 release of journalist and author Dylan Jones' "The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World's Greatest Unfinished Song," where Bob Dylan's quote first appeared on its cover.

Songwriter Jimmy Webb was at the peak of his powers in the late 1960s. In 1967, at the age of just 21, he was awarded the Grammy Award for song of the year for "Up, Up and Away." It was a huge hit for soul-pop group the 5th Dimension and created another classic in the heart-wrenching break-up song "MacArthur Park." His songs were incredibly striking, memorable, and it seemed he could use his imagination to write a song about anything.

That happened in the case of "Wichita Lineman." The inspiration for the song reportedly came to Webb when he was driving through the state in question on a simmering hot summer's day, heading down a seemingly deserted road. As he told Blender in 2001 (via The Financial Times), he was in an area that was "real flat and remote, almost surreal in its boundless horizons and infinite distances." Eventually, he encountered a man hanging in from a telephone, seemingly the only living person around for miles.

The man was a lineman, whose lonely job was to ascend telephone poles along the side of the road and test if the lines were in order. For Webb, the scene raised questions about human loneliness: How much of the man's mind was consumed by work, and how much by his imagined relationship with a partner far away? When Webb took his first version of "Wichita Lineman" to Glen Campbell's producer, Al De Lory, the writer was convinced the song required more lyrics. But De Lory thought it was perfect, giving us the sparse arrangement that gives the song so much of its power.

As well as hitting No. 3 on the Hot 100 chart in the U.S., "Wichita Lineman" went to the top spot in Canada and hit a respectable No. 7 in the United Kingdom. The single also helped propel Glen Campbell's studio album of the same name to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart — a record that eventually went double platinum.

But as Bob Dylan's quote shows, the legacy of "Wichita Lineman" goes far beyond its chart performance. Though Dylan himself has never released an official cover version of "Wichita Lineman" or played it live, the song's popularity among musicians saw it covered numerous times in the decades that followed. Acts as diverse as Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66, Kool & the Gang, Urge Overkill, and Guns N' Roses all took their shot at recording the song as their own.

"Wichita Lineman" has since been honored with several accolades marking it as one of the defining songs in modern popular music. The song has been inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame alongside another Webb-Campbell collaboration, "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." Campbell's version of "Wichita Lineman," which was backed by the legendary Wrecking Crew band, has also been inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. "I'm humbled and, at the same time for Glen, I am extremely proud," Jimmy Webb said in 2020. "I wish there was someway I could reach him to say, 'Glen, you know they're doing this. They are putting our music [on] a mountain — it will be preserved for all time."