He composed the melody to arrange in 1968, after Campbell had discovered accomplishment with another of his tunes, By the Time I Get to Phoenix.
"They called me and stated, 'Would you be able to keep in touch with us a melody about a town?'" he reviewed in a Radio 2 narrative about Campbell's profession.
"Also, I stated, 'I don't know I need to compose a melody about a town at this moment. I think I've overcompensated that'.
"He stated, 'well, would you be able to accomplish something topographical?' and I spent whatever is left of the evening sweating over Wichita Lineman."
In spite of the fact that the tune is determined to the Kansas-Oklahoma fringe, Webb really composed it at a great piano in Hollywood.
"I was living in a sort of mutual condition with 25 or 30 of my closest companions," he said in the book Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music.
"There were a few comedians who came into my music room and shower painted my piano green, I think, in light of [the verses to] MacArthur Park: 'All the sweet, green icing streaming down.' They thought it was really entertaining.
"So I spent the evening making an effort not to catch up on against the piano and composing a melody in the meantime. That entire evening was a comic drama, with a sticky green piano and a few frantic calls from the recording studio."
