As mentioned in Cassandra Wilson, this is another version of the song sung by a woman, whose name, alas, I cannot discover on Allmusic.com. She is the anonymous singer of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, who, in 1969, released their cover of the song on Ye-Me-Le. It was enough of a hit that it was rereleased as one of Twenty Easy Listening Classics. Ye-Me-Le is mostly covers of popular pop tunes of the time – it’s followed up by “Norwegian Wood”. This version feels a bit perfunctory, maybe with some historical reason: I have 11 other cover versions from 1969.

It’s quick: 2:47. There’s a spritely intro full of Latin percussion for ten seconds, then things slow down, for the verse, speeding up again after the chorus. What’s nice is that this start-stop dynamic is carried through the song: you can neatly divide it into three sections. Just before the third section starts, there are orchestral flourishes. The third section is followed by the glorious full-speed ending, with scat singing, probably improvised. This is the best part of the song – it could go on for another three minutes and I’d be quite happy. Probably this would have been a better song-as-a-song if they cut the first two choruses and verses and started with the orchestra at about 1:30.

The lyric here (sung in English) is quite honestly disposable. As mentioned previously, the position of the singer does get switched up in the first two lines (“He is a lineman for the county / And he rides the main roads”) but this isn’t followed up in the rest of the song. She goes back to the original “you” in “I can hear you through the wires”, and soon afterwards “I know I need a small vacation”. There doesn’t seem to be a connection made to the song’s switch to the third person later, which Cassandra Wilson makes. I don’t think this is particularly thought-out – it’s an easy cover version.

There’s undoubtedly something to be said about the cultural context of this version, but I don’t feel qualified to say anything about how Brazilian musicians covering “country” songs would have been received in the United States in the late 1960s. Were Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 seen as a novelty act? From the evidence of this song, I’d say they saw themselves as entertainers rather than artists, but it’s hard to tell.

Is this cover a novelty song? It’s certainly a jolly rendition of a sad song. I’m not sure that it’s being disrespectful to the song, however, so much as it’s using it as a base to play with. There’s a clear joy in how the song takes off when it leaves the choruses, which I think is the real worth of this rendition. Rather than a novelty, the cover might be being used as a Trojan horse to get that in the door.

Cassandra Wilson’s version of the song (from 2002, like Johnny Cash’s) stands out. First of all, she’s a woman – this is, predominantly, a song that male singers cover. Out of the 63 versions I presently have, there are all of five versions where there’s a woman singing the song. (Those figures aren’t counting background vocals & choirs.) Three of those five stick with the song’s original lyrics. The other two (Wilson’s and that of Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66) switch up the pronouns for the first line to make it more appropriate for a woman to sing. “He is a lineman for the county” the singer of Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 begins the song. But she drops this gender flippery after the first line and goes back to a first-person recitation of the travails of the Wichita Lineman (who, as normal, refers to himself in the third person in the chorus). That cover (of which more anon) is over in a breezy 2:47; the audience probably doesn’t notice that anything has happened, or stop to think about it.

Not so with Cassandra Wilson’s “Wichita Lineman”. She slows the song down tremendously to 5:48 – not the longest recitation that I have, but close to it. Her vocals don’t start for half a minute into the song, and immediately it’s clear that she’s attempting to make this her song: “My man’s a lineman for the county”. This carries through to the chorus: “I hear him singing through the wires / I can hear him through the whine / But my Wichita Lineman is still on the line.” Wilson’s reinterpretation is more radical than simply changing the voice of the song: she’s also changed the auditor of the song. In the original, it’s unclear who’s being sung to until you pops up in “I need you more than want you”; until then, however, the song could effectively be sung to no one; the lineman is pointedly lonely. Wilson excises the you: he’s become a he. She’s not singing the song to him.

The speaker isn’t pretending to be the kineman; she’s his worrisome lover. Wilson tidies some bits up: “I know he needs a short vacation” rather than a “small vacation”. One bit sounds off: “And if it snows, that stretch down south will never stand the strain”. This is the fretful thinking of the Wichita Lineman: why would his lover particularly care about this? She wouldn’t. It works with the original wording because it’s a metaphor for the relationship’s strain coming from the workman’s head.

Here it’s more clearly that particular metaphor – this is underscored by her transformation of “And I need you more than want you” to “I know I need him more than want him”: the speaker is considering the value of holding on to a long-distance relationship, emphasized by the but in the next line: “But my Wichita lineman” is still on the line”. This is a worry that doesn’t seem obvious in the original version of the song, except maybe as a hazy auditor, who might possibly hear the song from a distance. What the lineman’s lover might be thinking doesn’t come into the equation. It’s hard to even imagine the lineman, laconic as he is, imagining his lover’s thoughts.

Which brings us to the one part of the song that might not work in this reborn version: it’s laconicism. You can’t quite take that out of the song and still have it work: part of what makes the song interesting is its pointed lack of words. About half way through the song it runs out of words & has to start repeating them. The listener presumes that this is because the lineman himself is a man of few words. Wilson can’t quite get away from this: while she’s happy to change the individual lines, she doesn’t have the audacity to add more verses. However, she does want to draw out the song – this, by the way is done very nicely, and though I’ve said nothing about the instrumentation, rest assured that it’s very tasteful. So after about three minutes, she has to start repeating herself. And this, I think, is a betrayal of the character she’s created in the Lineman’s Lover: while the lineman lacks words, does it follow that his lover does as well?

It’s a fine rendition, but it’s reached an impasse: there’s only so far that you can take this song.

This is the version of the song that you find most often when you search for “wichita lineman” on my file-sharing service – though it’s worth noting that the KLF’s “Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard” does come up more often. Glen Campbell is in second place; after that, there’s no clear third place. This is a recent rendition: it’s off of 2003’s Unearthed, the box set of the late albums where they propped him up and made Mr. Cash sing mostly recent songs (“Hurt”, “Personal Jesus”, “I See a Darkness”) for the delight of the youth. That Cash was audibly old & wheezy helped sales along; that he died helped most of all.

This is of course cynical, but this is a rather perfunctory cover. “Wichita Lineman” didn’t make it onto any of the four discs that the box set mined. I don’t know that anyone would make the case that it’s as compelling as a song as the other work Cash was doing at the same time. But it’s Johnny Cash, you say. Of course it’s Johnny Cash, but it’s a song too, and I think it fails for that reason.

First, the instrumentation. This starts out with an acoustic guitar, with notes from a vibraphone strategically highlighting the dramatic parts. A piano comes in for the first chorus and stays around for the rest of the song. After the second chorus, dramatic guitar which doesn’t need to be there – this comes back towards the end as well. I don’t know why they did this &ndash it ruins the desolation that Cash’s voice has going. It’s too big & too country.

He clearly knows the song and sings it like he understands it (he can successfully parse “that stretch down South”, for example). But the quirks of the song (the vaguely wheedling tone of “I know I need a small vacation”) don’t work for him in the same way that he can make the quirks of the other songs he was covering at about this time work. Consider his tone in his cover of Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat”, for example, as he lists off the mystic objects in his jail cell – the weirdness there is more powerful than the fire-and-brimstone of the climax of that song. Does Johnny Cash need “a small vacation”? The irony veiled in the line – the speaker clearly wants more than a small vacation – isn’t lost on Cash, but Cash’s voice isn’t quite suited for the trickiness implied. When one is old & gnarled one should be a voice of capital-T Truth. And I don’t know that that’s what happening here.

Cash’s vocal doesn’t work for the song, not because it’s not desolate enough, but because desolation isn’t enough. This is not a song for old men.

This is ostensibly from an album entitled Live in Berlin 1974 and it’s awful. Deeply awful.

What’s happening here: it’s instrumental and it goes on for four minutes and seventeen seconds. There is crowd applause at the beginning and the end. The organ is wrong: it sounds convincingly fake, although I know that in 1974 you couldn’t have had a MIDI organ (more on that presently). There’s electric jazz guitar over the top, starting off by pretending to be tasteful & Spanish and then giving in to the impulse to have a big electric Lynyrd Skynyrd-style rave-up, which happens about three minutes in. Live drumming, of course.

It’s maybe worth noting that the “Wichita Lineman” content gets mostly taken care of in the first minute and a half, at which point things start getting wobbly and proggish. It’s a false alarm, though: they go back and do another verse before, at the two-and-a-half minute mark, they go off and do their own thing with guitar solos.

Why would you do this? Who goes around thinking “What if we played ‘Wichita Lineman’ but made it more awesome?” Or maybe they just wanted a song to function as a framework in which to be more awesome and “Wichita Lineman” is something everybody knew – which matters, I suppose, if you’re trying to get a response out of a crowd.