#16 - 9 to 5 / Dolly Parton

Why do we work? The answer might seem obvious; as teenagers the world over have long been told, the world does not owe you a living, but predictions by economists that technological advances would inevitably lead to shorter working hours have not been borne out. We work more than ever, and experience more stress and dissatisfaction with our lives as a result. As Dolly Parton's famous song about the working life, '9 to 5', puts it: 'it's enough to drive you crazy, if you let it'. It was released at a moment when work was changing rapidly: agriculture and manufacturing jobs were collapsing, the number of women in work had risen dramatically, and the power of organised labour was permanently diminished. Parton, a sharper and more subtle songwriter than almost any of her contemporary critics could credit, was able to write a song in the midst of these historic changes which speaks to anyone who's ever watched a clock, longing for the working day to end: 'working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living'. 

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of '9 to 5' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. In 2019, a meme started gaining traction on social media which featured two students at their desks taking a test; one is looking over the shoulder of the other, trying to copy her answers; the student being copied is captioned ‘Dolly Parton’ and the paper in front of her is ‘9 to 5’, the student copying her is labelled Karl Marx, writing the Communist Manifesto. Unlike other recent examples of Parton’s virality online, this is one meme which Parton, unsurprisingly, declined to endorse, opting not to validate an association with a historical figure still considered beyond the pale among much of her fanbase. Besides, a constant throughout her long career has been her aversion to being drawn into explicitly political discussions or movements; she has never endorsed anyone for president, and when she appeared alongside her 9 to 5 co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin at the 2017 Emmy Awards, she opted not to join in their open criticism of the then-president, choosing instead to make a joke about how she hoped ‘to get one of those Grace and Frankie vibrators in my swag bag tonight’.

And yet it is a narrow definition of politics which limits it to a person’s attitude towards a particular figure or election campaign. Dolly Parton’s life and work challenges us to rethink many things, including the nature of politics itself, and by taking this song, the theme song to the film she made in 1980, with Fonda and Tomlin, as an important cultural artefact in that significant historical moment, the year of Ronald Reagan’s first presidential victory, we can observe the complex political intervention Parton was making. By releasing a country song about the pains and absurdities of work at the very moment the New Right - a coalition of evangelical Christians and neoliberal economists implacably hostile to organised labour - achieved its greatest victory, Parton was doing something unquestionably political. Discerning the various nuances in the politics of this song will, however, require us first to look at the development of ideas around work in the period leading up to Parton’s emergence, then more specifically to see those ideas as they manifested in the popular country music of that era. It will also invite us to think about the role of work in Parton’s own life story, and the way she’s used that story, to present herself and her music, starting with the deeply loving account she gives of her father and of their tiny rural community bordering the Great Smoky Mountains, in East Tennessee.

‘Life at the new house … didn’t seem that different to me, but the difference was a great one for my daddy. For the first time he wasn’t a sharecropper … He was determined to build a better life for all of us. … Making something out of this was going to be more work than sharecropping ever was. But Daddy did it … [he] worked long, hard hours, but the old place finally began to shape up’; at this point in Parton’s autobiography, she’s still a small child, five-years-old. The family has moved into a new house to allow them to move out of sharecropping - a highly exploitative arrangement between farmers and landowners common in the United States from the end of slavery to the 1960s - and into, as she puts it, ‘a better life’. Instantly recognisable in her telling of this episode are the elements of a foundational ideal in American life: starting with next to nothing, through hard work, determination and sacrifice, you can achieve a better life for yourself and your children. In ways which will become significant later in her story, the subject of this narrative has almost invariably been gendered male: it is the father of a household who shoulders the bulk of the burden of all this hard work; he does it for his family, fulfilling what is his male pride and duty. In this way, even if an American man begins life in conditions close to slavery, he is not a slave because he can supercede them through his own initiative. In 1861, in his inaugural address to Congress, Abraham Lincoln underlined this distinction, saying, ‘There is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life … The prudent, penniless beginner labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.’ Drawing on this long tradition, in 1971, Richard Nixon, in a speech on Labor Day, declared that ‘the work ethic has for two centuries enabled the American workingman to make this land the citadel of individual freedom and of opportunity’. Weaving the older narrative of work as the means to achieve self-reliance into one of national pride, he also added, more dogmatically, that ‘labor is good in itself … a man or woman at work … becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working’.

It’s worth considering that this speech - possibly the most forceful deployment of the Protestant work ethic by an American president ever - was made in an era of active trade union militancy unrecognisable to any generation brought up since 1980, and was made on the day - Labor Day - designed specifically to recognise the achievements of the American labour movement. Nixon at the time was facing resistance to his economic reforms but the speech more generally suggests an anxiety about growing opposition to what historians of labour have called the Fordist form of work - long, gruelling, repetitive work on the assembly line - which had been in place since the early twentieth century. Historian Studs Terkel, in the introduction to Working, his wide-ranging 1974 study of the experiences of American workers, wrote, ‘In the thirties … not very many questioned their lot. Those rebels who found flaws in our society were few in number. This time around, “the system stinks” was a [‘recurrent’] phrase’, and for many of the workers he interviewed, ‘there is a hardly concealed discontent … “I’m a machine,” says the spot-welder. “I’m caged,” says the bank teller … “I’m a mule,” says the steelworker. “A monkey can do what I do,” says the receptionist. “I’m less than a farm implement,” says the migrant worker.’ As this list of jobs suggests, discontent had spread well beyond what might be thought of as typical working-class roles in manufacturing and heavy industry. The nature of work in western economies was rapidly changing; patterns of employment over the last century show a collapse in the number of workers employed in industry and agriculture, while in the same period, the number of workers in service and administrative roles increased dramatically, to the point where they accounted for three-quarters of total employment by the year 2000. The number of women in employment had also, by 1980, markedly increased; in 1979 the proportion of American women in paid work passed 50% for the first time, more than double the rate recorded fifty years earlier. If the emblematic figure of working life in 1930 was a male construction worker on the railways or at the car assembly line, by 1980, it might more accurately be said to have been, say, a female typist working as a personal assistant on the twelfth floor of a faceless insurance firm in the city.

Doralee Rhodes, the character Dolly Parton plays in the film, 9 to 5, suffers the sexual harassment and misogyny typical of the experience of women entering the workplace for the first time in the 1970s. Her boss, Franklin Hart, who has been promoted ahead of the woman who trained him, rules the office with an oblivious narcissism and a chauvinistic assumption of his dominance over the women who work for him. Daringly, the bulk of the film is taken up with enactments of the three women’s fantasies of murdering him, and Hart in fact spends much of his screen time tied up and imprisoned by them as they decide what to do with him. The film is also excellent in the less dramatic but highly relatable moments when we see the three employees having to suppress their true feelings about his behaviour, accommodating his quirks and boorishness and, generally, pretending to be happy with the work they have to do and the conditions they have to do it in. In 1983, the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild published a study of the psychological demands made of workers called The Managed Heart, in which she coined the influential phrase ‘emotional labour’ to describe the extra effort workers are required to put in at work to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’; in other words, emotional labour is the work you do to put both your customer - and your employer - at ease, according to the expectations, usually unwritten, of your company and industry. In the work of the air hostesses she interviewed, for example, their formal duties were dwarfed by the tremendous efforts they undertook as a matter of routine to attend to their customers’ well-being: constantly monitoring their body language and tone of speech to make sure they were coming across as affable and caring, absorbing the anger and frustrations of customers after a late take-off, pretending not to notice rude or harassing speech, and, at all times, giving the customer the impression that they enjoy their work, that it is indeed, a pleasure to serve.

As Hochschild herself noted, what she was putting her finger on was not a new phenomenon - workers have always had to interpret their bosses’ feelings and do unacknowledged work in managing those feelings - but the changing nature of work meant that emotional labour was now foregrounded to an unprecedented degree. As she put it, the ‘assembly-line worker has for some time been an outmoded symbol of modern industrial labor; fewer than 6 per cent of workers now work on assembly lines. Another kind of labor has now come into symbolic prominence - the voice-to-voice or face-to-face delivery of service … ‘communication’ and ‘encounter’ … is the central work relationship today’. What’s more, this type of work attached itself to women disproportionately, a trend which ran in parallel with the increasing number of women in the workplace. Hochschild theorised that this derived from existing social expectations that women were simply more naturally adept caregivers than men, writing memorably, ‘The world turns to women for mothering, and this fact silently attaches itself to many a job description’.

Her analysis built on an important movement in 1970s feminism: the campaign to make visible the work women have long done to make and maintain the home, raising children and caring for those who go out to do remunerated work, known in the Marxist tradition as ‘reproductive labour’, sometimes expressed through the famous demand for ‘wages for housework’. Writing in 1976, the poet Adrienne Rich put it directly: ‘Women are not described as ‘working’ when we create the essential conditions for the work of men; we are supposed to be acting out of love, instinct, or devotion to some higher cause than self … The efforts of women in labor … the efforts of women to keep filth and decay at bay, children decently clothed, to produce the clean shirt in which the man walks out daily into the common world of men … There is still little but contempt and indifference for this kind of work, these efforts.’ This social backdrop allows us not only to see why Dolly Parton, by then an established female recording artist, fast becoming country music’s most high-profile star, may have been so well-placed to write the era’s greatest musical challenge to the ideology of work for work’s sake, but it also lets us dispense with the question of whether the song is feminist or simply a great protest song about work; it is one because it is the other. She was able to draw on a form of feminism which may not have named itself as such but which nonetheless was alert to the long history of unappreciated and ignored women’s labour in order to pinpoint the thanklessness of waged work in general. Explaining the origin of the famous use of her fingernails on a typewriter which creates the washboard-like rhythmic pattern at the start of ‘9 to 5’, she wrote, ‘I remember writing the song on the back of my script and using my fingernails to create a rhythm as I sang it … Any time I started working on it, the women on the set would just naturally gather around to listen. My hairdresser would start clacking her brushes together in time to the rhythm I had set up. The script supervisor would chime in, slapping her clipboard in time. Before long, I had created a whole section of backup singers made up of all of the working women around me. Because of what the song had to say, I thought that was especially appropriate.’

The association of country music with the culture of white conservatives of the former Confederate states is now so entrenched it can be surprising to look into the history of the genre and witness firstly, its diverse social origins, and secondly, to see its identification with whiteness and conservatism coming into being as a historical process, rather than something it embodied from the outset. Bill C Malone, in the still-standard history of the genre, Country Music, U. S. A., describes how as soon as country or ‘hillbilly’ music appeared in North America, it absorbed ‘influences from other musical sources, particularly from the culture of Afro-Americans’, even saying that it was this ‘interrelationship of black and white musical styles’ which ‘set southern music apart’, noting drily that ‘White southerners, many of whom would have been horrified at the idea of mixing socially with blacks, have nonetheless enthusiastically accepted their musical offerings’, albeit often through their disguised appearance in the work of white musicians and performers.

Malone sets the drift of country towards its modern stereotypical public image in the context of ‘the sweeping and bewildering social changes that occurred in the wake of World War II’, arguing that ‘country music seemed a safe retreat to many because it suggested [that] the “bedrock” American values of solidity, respect for authority, old-time religion, home-based virtues, and patriotism’ were ‘still intact’. Country singers during the 1960s decried the drug-taking and sexual practices of the hippy movement, as well as Vietnam War protestors and those who refused conscription, but nothing catalysed the formation of reactionary white identity in this period as much as the civil rights movement and the campaign to end racial segregation. The first national political figure to associate himself with country music was George Wallace, who as governor of Alabama notoriously declared in 1963 that he stood for ‘segregation forever’. The music historian J Lester Feder has brilliantly documented this crucial period in the evolution of country music, writing that ‘the earliest country stars … campaigned for populist [left-wing figures]; [creator of the New Deal] F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt] was celebrated in songs of the Depression … Country music only became synonymous with mainline conservatism … in the late '60s’. If we look at the country music being made during this period, it’s clear how central ideas about work were in this important cultural shift.

Consider Johnny Cash, the most prominent country music performer of the decade prior to Parton’s emergence, who, like her, had been raised in at-times severe economic hardship and who also bore tribute to the hard labour his father had done simply to keep the family alive. The comments he makes in his autobiography on his own working life are characteristically to-the-point: ‘My work has been simple: cotton as a youth and music as an adult. In between I was an automobile factory worker in Michigan, a radio intercept operator for the United States Air Force in Germany, and a door-to-door appliance salesman for the Home Equipment Company of Memphis, Tennessee. I was a great radio operator and a terrible salesman.’ He pays tribute to the role Roosevelt’s New Deal played in giving his father the means to establish a farm in a co-operative settlement with other farmers in Dyess, Arkansas, a ‘Promised Land’, as he puts it, in which he ‘grew up under a kind of socialism’. He describes in detail the work the whole family did in the planting and harvesting of cotton, ‘from dawn till nighttime six days a week’, wondering along the way how many of the official representatives of country, what he calls the ‘country music establishment’, ‘ever filled a cotton sack’.

In the late 1950s, Cash’s star was rising, scoring his first US country top ten hits and playing the first of his famous prison concerts at San Quentin Prison in 1958. By 1960 he was well-established enough to be invited by Columbia Records to make a series of concept albums on themes from American history: Ballads of the Old West, in which Cash inhabited a cowboy persona to sing tales of the pre-Civil War western frontier, Bitter Tears, devoted to stories of Native American figures past and present, and one, Blood, Sweat and Tears, which covered material relating to manual labourers. Years later, he would remember these albums as some of the work he was most proud of, saying that what linked them was that ‘They brought out voices that weren’t commonly heard at the time - voices that were ignored or even suppressed in the entertainment media, not to mention the political and educational establishments … I was trying to get at the reality behind some of our country’s history’. Blood, Sweat and Tears is permeated with the reality of physical labour, opening with the sound of a hammer knocking against stone, which initiates a series of stories of men digging ditches, pulling loads of coal and laying rails. If ‘9 to 5’ is a picture of working lives in the emerging post-Fordist era, this album is its Fordist equivalent: a form of work the writer Amelia Horgan has described as ‘routine, hierarchical, mind-deadening, mechanical … [tying] people to one task, sometimes even one movement, for the rest of their lives’. What’s striking about Cash’s album, aside from its commitment to authenticity, is the psychology of reluctance and resistance it reflects in the lives of the working characters he represents. The protagonist of the album’s most famous song, John Henry, is a super-masculine working-class hero who goes to his grave defying the meanness of his bosses. Consistently, Cash makes clear that the labour the characters in these songs undertake is done under threat of violence or destitution or both. In ‘Tell Him I’m Gone’, one of the two Cash originals on the album, the singer is on the point of fleeing his work, because he’s fed up with the ‘kicks and whippings’ and living with the threat of his boss’s ‘99 calibre’.

The evolution of the idea of work in country music from this point can be seen in the figure of Merle Haggard, who was inspired to become a country singer as a 21-year-old inmate of San Quentin prison when Cash performed there, and who, in 1969, stumbled on the formula which would make him famous when he wrote the anti-hippy song, ‘Okie from Muskogee’. It opens with the line, ‘We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee’, and goes on to state his allegiance to cowboy boots, the armed forces and the flag of the Confederacy. It’s possible, depending on which interview of Haggard’s you read, that the song was intended at least in part as a spoof, but it became such a success that Haggard would go on to carve out a successful career by revisiting these themes again and again, becoming the favourite country singer of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the process. He would also write and record country music’s most famous ‘Workin’ Man Blues’, and the difference between his picture of the working life and Cash’s is telling; if anything, Haggard’s ‘blues’ is a misnomer. His working-man could, if he chose to, take another option - he mentions that he ‘sometimes thinks about leaving’ and ‘bumming around’ - but as a proud and responsible working man, he ‘goes back working’, and is most insistent on the point that he has ‘never been on welfare’, the ‘one place’ he ‘will not be’.

Haggard, and the theme of work, would appear at the most significant point in the consolidation of country music and the reactionary backlash to the various challenges to American political orthodoxy in the 60s when Nixon, shortly after his election in 1968 which had seen a serious primary challenge by the segregationist governor, George Wallace, created a ‘country music month’ in October 1970. It became part of Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ to transform southern states which had long voted Democrat into Republican strongholds by associating with white identity in a desegregating America. Right-wing figures such as Nixon could gloss over the gap between their economics and those of southern democrats, which had tended towards the statism of Roosevelt’s New Deal, by playing up their affinity with the cultural values of country music. In doing so, the government could be cast not as the provider of relief to rural communities, as it had been in the 1930s, but as tyrannical ‘big government’ forcing de-segregation on white America.

Nixon had his entreaties reciprocated by the Country Music Association when, in 1972, the singer Tex Ritter presented the president with an album called Thank You Mr. President, on which Merle Haggard appears. In his introduction to the recording, Ritter underlined how important the notion of work was to this political-cultural coalition: ‘Country music, Mr. President, like yourself, has always gloried in the hard work that men do. Our country writers and singers have always paid homage, as you have, to the working-man’. Nothing had so central a place in the ideology of the New Right as the idea of ‘hard work’. Ritter made the key manoeuvre in the construction of so-called ‘blue-collar conservatism’: overlooking the extent to which any pride working-class people had historically taken in their work was due to the fact that it was a living made in imposed adversity, and instead treating it as pride pure and simple, as if it was a life that was freely and gladly chosen. The most formative moment in Johnny Cash’s young life was the sudden death of his older brother in an accident when Cash was 14, and he concludes the chapter in his autobiography on that terrible episode like this: ‘what still depresses me the most about Jack’s death [is] the fact that his funeral took place on Sunday, May 21, 1944, and on the morning of Monday, May 22, our whole family - everybody, including the mother who had just buried her son - was back in the fields chopping cotton, working their ten-hour day.//I watched as my mother fell to her knees and let her head drop onto her chest. My poor daddy came up to her and took her arm, but she brushed him away./’I’ll get up when God pushes me up!’ she said, so angrily, so desperately. And soon she was on her feet, working with her hoe./Lest you get too romantic an impression of the good, natural, hardworking, character-building country life back then, back there, remember that picture of Carrie Cash down in the mud between the cotton rows on any mother’s worst possible day.’

So by the time Dolly Parton emerged into national prominence in the early 1970s, the musical tradition she sang in was solidly identified with the modern conservative values of faith, nation and small government. Parton scored her first crossover hit - ‘Jolene’ - in 1973, the year fellow country singer Loretta Lynn appeared on the cover of Newsweek and a year before Merle Haggard himself was featured on the cover of Time. To succeed in such a world was double-edged: a performer wanting success in country music had to adhere ostensibly to those values but once there might be better placed to critique them than those outside the culture. Parton has always trodden a careful line between being faithful to those values and maintaining a critical eye on them when required. Frequently she has navigated this through an uncanny ability to pre-empt the worst forms of abuse she would be in line to receive as a high-profile, successful working-class woman. Her first hit was titled ‘Dumb Blonde’, she’s always played up the aspects of her image which would typically be thought of as shamelessly poor taste, often describing herself as ‘white trash’, and most strikingly, she has frequently associated herself with sex work, explaining how she based her look on ‘the beautiful woman that used to walk the streets’ in her hometown, playing a sex worker on film more than once, and on the album on which ‘9 to 5’ appears, 1980’s Odd Jobs, covering the famous traditional about a New Orleans brothel, ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, from the perspective not of a client, as in the 1964 version by the Animals, but of a woman working there.

Underpinning this savvy self-deprecation, however, is a serious commitment to certain values typically associated with conservatism, namely, her devout Christian faith, which she has always made clear, and hard work. The man who gave her her first break in music was the Tennessee businessman and radio personality, Cas Walker; Parton tells the story of their first meeting like this: ‘I choked back my butterflies and finally managed to say, “Mr. Walker, I want to work for you.” He shook my hand and said, “Well, you’ve got a job.” He told me, “A lot of people come to me and say, Mr. Walker, I want a job, but you said I want to work for you. You’re hired because you’re the first one that ever wanted to work.”’ She stresses how she derived her work ethic from her father’s family, the Partons, who had always been ‘hardworking … no-nonsense farmers’ and draws a line directly from the ‘dirt and calluses’ she got harvesting corn with the rest of the family, to her capacity to ‘put out the sweat and tears’ in pursuit of a successful music career.

Affection and respect for the hard work people do is clear in ‘9 to 5’ itself. The opening lyrics take us quickly from tumbling out of bed to the traffic on the way to work; at the song’s brisk tempo, this dense sequence of images - the bed, the kitchen, the shower, the street - capture succinctly the experience of anyone who’s ever had to rush madly to get to work. Amongst that, she finds space to universalise it, noting ‘folk like me on the job’, a point emphasised by the montage of a succession of commuters struggling to get to work which accompanies it in the film. Even at this early point in the song, we’ve already gone beyond the personal emphasis typical to the traditional workingman’s blues into a more inclusive statement about working lives in general. The song’s arrangement is effervescent: we have horns and chirpy backing singers; the harmony is solidly built on the fundamental chords of the major scale, I, IV and V; and the melody, in the verses, is emblematically aspirational, based on a sequence of upward arpeggiated steps, neatly reflecting the singer’s intention to ‘move ahead’. The brightness of the song’s sound and certain select lyrics - the moment she pours herself a ‘cup of ambition’, for instance - suggest why the song has sometimes been mistaken for an uncomplicated celebration of the American Dream: the idea that if you work hard it’s possible to achieve a wholly better life, an attitude which, as we’ve seen in the way she tells her own story, Parton at times appears to share. When she re-recorded the song for a 2021 Super Bowl advert, for the website-building service Squarespace, it was renamed ‘5 to 9’, the idea being that Squarespace enables people to become creative entrepreneurs in their out-of-office hours, manifesting in the process the perfect neoliberal subject, a person who literally works 24 hours a day. As David Lee, Squarespace’s chief creative officer, put it, ‘Dolly … has been hustling her entire life and could really relate to the message we were trying to tell’.

In one of the many passages in her autobiography where Parton describes the tremendous efforts her family would undertake to eke a living from the land, there’s a moment where she reflects on the meaning of all that labour, and, in doing so, channels the deep current of anti-materialism which runs through much traditional country music: ‘When you think about it, gold has no real value at all. It’s too soft to make tools out of, and you can’t possibly scrape enough of it together to make a good cooking pot’, before going on, ‘When I think about survival and the things Mama and Daddy did to keep us all alive and reasonably healthy, I am aware that it was not just their wills and wits that kept us going. It was a legacy passed down from every mountain dweller who had ever learned anything about surviving hundreds of years before, starting with the Native Americans. Other than the land itself, this was the most important thing parents had to leave their children and my parents had learned it well.’ Here we see the heart of her respect for hard work and it stands in pointed contrast to familiar mainstream exhortations to work hard: there’s no sense that work was the chief way to achieve personal fulfilment or that they were doing it in the masochistic spirit of ‘building character’. In her allusion to the Native American origins of the family’s rural, traditional Appalachian way of life, there’s even a subtle rejection of Nixon’s claim that throughout its history men and women were inspired to work hard to build the American nation. The Parton family simply worked, she suggests, in order to survive, and they did so within folk traditions of survival which stretch back before the founding of America itself. It was never done for its own sake, or out of patriotic pride, and was not, ultimately, a reflection of their particular worth as individuals - ‘it was not just their wills and wits that kept us going’ - but was rather the product of many generations of hard-won practical knowledge and the strength of their local community, which elsewhere she describes with almost as much devotion as she does her mother and father.

It’s this powerful appreciation for the true value of her origins, as well as her deceptively sharp sense of humour, which provides the basis for Parton’s remarkable capacity to challenge the very ideology country music appeared to support wholeheartedly. We’ve already seen how directly ‘9 to 5’ - the song and the film - confronts 1970s workplace culture, but the range of material on Odd Jobs goes further. Following ‘9 to 5’, the album’s opener, is Parton’s arrangement of ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’, a choice which takes us back to one of the chronicled origin points for the history of American popular song - the 1854 ‘melodies’ of Stephen Foster, traditionally cited as ‘the father of American music’. Characteristically, Parton turns this historic if somewhat stately anthem of compassion towards the generic ‘poor’ into an anguished lullaby sung by a mother struggling to feed her baby. Perhaps the album’s most surprising selection is ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)’, a song about the deaths of 28 migrant farm workers in a 1948 plane crash by the communist songwriter Woody Guthrie, which turns on radio coverage Guthrie heard referring to the victims not by name but only as ‘deportees’. In the mouth of a country singer, the song is subversive in two ways: firstly, through its association with probably the most famous political radical in American musical history, and secondly, through the song’s defiant note of solidarity with a group of people historically both exploited and scapegoated in America: Mexican immigrants. Parton also covers ‘Dark as a Dungeon’, a stunningly bleak picture of mine work, written in 1946 by the country singer Merle Travis, and subsequently used by generations of workers to protest bad conditions. The song has something of the unconsoled bitterness with which Johnny Cash spoke of his family in the fields the day after his brother’s funeral: with scathing irony, working in a mine is framed as an addiction, like ‘dope’ or ‘wine’, when really it is a situation more like imprisonment, as the title suggests; in the final verse, the singer hopes his dead body can be turned into coal so he can look down from heaven and ‘pity the miners/a-diggin’ my bones’. Parton wrote three songs on Odd Jobs; ‘9 to 5’, a duet with her former musical partner Porter Wagoner, ‘Poor Folks Town’, and a fascinating celebration of women at work called ‘Working Girl’. The lyric constructs a tableaux of professional women, who collectively constitute the ‘working girl’: ‘she has so many faces, she wears so many names’, Parton sings, and each verse pictures a different guise a woman might inhabit at work: one is ‘elegant and stylish … with designer clothes from Halston and Diane von Furstenburg’, another is ‘dressed according to standard uniform’, one is ‘single and free’, another is ‘a mother and a wife’. There seems to be an intuition here of the pitfalls of singular political narratives around women and work. In an interview, Parton has spoken about wanting to write a song for ‘all the working women out there’ and for ‘all the folks I knew growing up with’ but there’s a clear intention in this song to take account of the variety of experience within conventionally homogenised groups, aware, perhaps, of the way general statements about ‘working people’ have often been used by politicians and others for ideological ends. The pride Parton’s ‘working girl’ takes in her work is also nuanced: amongst the descriptions of her strength and achievement, there’s an ambiguous moment where she ‘weeps like a willow when … brought to her knees’. The use of the phrase, ‘Working Girl’, of course, is a play on an old euphemism for a female sex worker, and so should be seen as an extension of Parton’s career-long antipathy towards the shame of sex work. I wonder, though, if there might be, smuggled into her deployment of this particular phrase in the context of a film and concept album about contemporary working lives in general, an implication that paid work intrinsically carries some of the debasement typically associated with sex work. We are all selling ourselves, in one way or another, and perhaps the pinning of terrible shame on the act of trading one’s sexuality in exchange for the means of subsistence, while other, more respectable forms of paid employment are meant to be one’s chief source of personal pride, has an element of deflection to it.

And what is it, fundamentally, that we sell when we’re at work? Anyone who has ever watched a clock longing for the working day to end knows the answer to this. In 1968, the British historian Ronald Fraser compiled a series of anonymous personal accounts of work from an array of different professions. The representative of factory work expressed this with complete clarity: ‘I work in a factory. For eight hours a day, five days a week, I’m the exception to the rule that life can’t exist in a vacuum. Work to me is a void, and I begrudge every precious minute of my time that it takes … Time, rather than content, is the measure of factory life. Time is what the factory worker sells: not labour, not skill, but time, dreary time.’ With typical concision, Parton captures the basic absurdity of selling one’s time in a single line: ‘Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living’, and once we’ve heard it, the breadth of the rest of the song’s critique is remarkable: the singer has given and is giving the best part of her life to the job: her time, her ‘service and devotion’ and even her ‘mind’, only to find she’s ‘barely getting by’, with no human sympathy offered by those she’s doing it all for. She then proceeds to dismantle the notion that all this thankless work may be worth it if it allows you to follow your dreams. Perhaps the most crushing moment of the song is when the singer, who has already recognised that ‘They let you dream/Just to watch them shatter’, nonetheless still allows herself to indulge in what is clearly fantasy: one day ‘your ship’ll come in/And the tide’s gonna turn/And it’s all gonna roll your way’. The dissonant, entirely plausible psychology of Parton’s character here is startling, as is the line which enters almost unnoticed during the repeat choruses which close out the song: ‘It’s a rich man’s game, no matter what they call it, and you spend your life putting money in his wallet’. It’s hard to see Nixon or Reagan nodding along with that, no matter how much of a country music national treasure Dolly Parton might have been, but while the line’s anti-capitalist overtones are clearly what has got certain listeners over the years most excited about it, I imagine what Parton would value in it is how true to life the sentiment feels: that deeply-felt intuition that you are giving so much of yourself - spending your life - towards other people’s projects, which other people will take pride - and profit - from; people who will not know or remember you beyond your utility to them during working hours. 

Does any of this, though, really constitute a politics? It’s one thing to observe the irrationality and dishonesty of the way things are but what can we say about the singer’s attitude towards it? It’s clear there’s anger in the song but are we meant to think that she - and by extension we - will act on it, determined to bring about change, or is it a cry of futility, an encouragement to accept the situation and resign oneself to, as the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has put it, the ‘horror implicit in the necessity of earning a living, an expression in itself abominable’? 

I want to revisit the comments of the music historian Bill Malone where, in his introduction to his history of country music, makes clear how hybrid and diverse the evolution of the style was: ‘Country music - seemingly the most “pure white” of all American musical forms - has borrowed heavily from African Americans … the spirituals, the blues, ragtime, rhythm-and-blues, hip-hop, and a whole host of dance steps, vocal shadings, and instrumental techniques’. We can see this influence in ‘9 to 5’ in a number of ways: there’s a gospel quality to the backing vocal arrangements, for instance, and the song’s powerful groove - its up-tempo and pronounced sense of pulse - is difficult to imagine being derived solely from European influences. But it can also be seen deep in the song’s tonal structure - a sort of compressed blues form - with the most striking moment being the use of a note from the blues scale (a flattened, minor-sounding note over a major chord) on the first note of the chorus: the ‘9’ of ‘9 to 5’. Parton is able to leverage the charged ambiguity of the blues by deploying this particular dissonance at the climax of her melody; it expresses a dense, ironic multiplicity of feeling both cynical in its realism and stoic in its refusal to submit to despair. The dissonance is resolved upwards in the next phrase, when the A natural becomes a more settled A sharp on the ‘get’ of ‘getting by’, which in the context of the song’s furious forward momentum, sounds like gasping for breath, of the singer only just managing to stay afloat. 

It’s possible to hear that same quality as a reflection of the character’s sheer energy; a similar tribute, perhaps, to the one Parton pays to the activity of working women in songs like ‘Working Girl’. But that same vivacity, which is palpable from the song’s very first moments, seems to fold in on itself the longer the song goes on: its structure is conventional until the final section when we have four full repeats of the chorus, moving into a fifth as it starts to fade out. These repetitions have something of the violent slapstick of the film: what starts out as a wholesome-sounding perkiness seems to spill into something like mania or madness. The song, of course, does not point towards the end of private property or wage labour, it is not ‘political’ in the sense that some of its admirers might wish it to be, but it does push hard at the psychic wounds almost all of us receive in the course of our working lives. It captures, with wit and extraordinary deftness, the daily collision between the individual, with all her complex and irreducible thoughts and feelings, and a world which demands the exchange of exactly that rich selfhood for simple survival: ‘it’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it’. 

It’s in this delicately balanced line that we can see most clearly what Parton is doing in ‘9 to 5’, something that reaches back into her earliest experiences of song, of singing with her family, and listening to her mother, ‘while she sang old-timey mountain songs … I will never forget the sound of her lone voice resounding sweetly off the stones of the fireplace as she sang, “Farther along we’ll know all about it/Farther along we’ll understand why/Cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine/We’ll understand it all by and by”’. Parton channelled a clear-eyed understanding of the world - we spend our lives putting money in someone else’s pocket - and coupled it with that deeply-embedded intention in folk song to console: it’s enough to drive you crazy, if you let it; her stance towards the world is undeceived about its cruelties and hypocrisies, including those involved in the so-called solutions of conventional politics, but nevertheless seeks to remind us that we are capable of getting through it all. It’s an expression of support which, in the very act of making it, demonstrates that the impulse to sustain each other survives intact.

In the next episode of the Secret Life of Songs I’ll be thinking about music and memory in Cyndi Lauper’s great song, ‘Time After Time’. It reveals itself as a remarkably thoroughgoing reflection on how memory is key not just to our sense of time but to our sense of ourselves. I’ll be asking: how is it that a song is capable of capturing these elusive yet integral aspects of being alive?

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.