Glen Campbell - By the Time I Get to Phoenix
By the time I get to Phoenix she’ll be rising
She’ll find the note I left hangin’ on her door
She’ll laugh when she reads the part that says I’m leavin’
‘Cause I’ve left that girl so many times before
By the time I make Albuquerque she’ll be working
She’ll prob’ly stop at lunch and give me a call
But she’ll just hear that phone keep on ringin’
Off the wall that’s all
By the time I make Oklahoma she’ll be sleepin’
She’ll turn softly and call my name out loud
And she’ll cry just to think I’d really leave her
Tho’ time and time I try to tell her so
She just didn’t know I would really go.
“By the Time I Get to Phoenix” doesn’t specify a starting point for the singer’s trip to Oklahoma. I figure that he probably started in Buckeye or Goodyear Ariz., and that his destination was Texhoma, Okla, the closest point in the Sooner State to his starting point.
In 1967, when the song was a hit, much of the trip would have been over two-lane highways, so he would have had to step on the gas to get there in a day.