Dolly Day: Steve Earle on the Enduring Empathy of Dolly Parton's ‘9 to 5’

Ella Langley set a record with her 23rd week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Choosin’ Texas,” a song that — because of the fragmentation in modern formats — is still unknown to a fair amount of music fans.

Dolly Parton , by contrast, got just one week at the top on the pop list in 1981 with “9 to 5,” and just about everyone knew it. Inside and out.

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Forty-five years later, in the wake of Parton’s death on Aug. 25, much of America is celebrating Dolly Day on Sept. 25 — not because it marks one month since her passing, but because Sept. 25 is represented numerically as 9/25. Or “9 to 5.” It may not be recognized as her greatest song, but that’s just because her catalog is so competitive that “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” or “I Will Always Love You” tend to beat it when analysts consider such things.

But when it became the theme song of the movie that first put her on the big screen — alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin — “9 to 5” finished the job that she’d started with “Here You Come Again,” broadening her to the audience beyond country music.

“A lot of people learned about Dolly because it crossed genres and they saw the movie — an audience that would have never known her before,” Nashville Songwriters Association International executive director Bart Herbison said on the red carpet before the Nashville Songwriter Awards on Sept. 22.

“Not everybody can write for a project,” he added, “but Dolly — she nailed it.”

Literally. As Parton recalled hundreds of times, she started “9 to 5” on the movie set, brushing the fingernails on one hand across the nails on the other to create a rhythmic backdrop as she formed the words and music in her head. The movie cast her as a secretary, Doralee, whose sexist boss isolated her socially in the office by claiming falsely to the rest of the staff that he was having an affair with her.

Believing that lie, her co-workers wanted nothing to do with her.

For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, trust that Parton’s character — mirroring Parton’s real-life resilience — managed to overcome the situation, and the script developed into a hilarious tale of warranted retribution.

“It was soft feminism,” said attorney Stacey Schlitz , widow of songwriter Don Schlitz (“The Gambler,” “Forever and Ever, Amen”). “In some circles, you know, feminist is a bad word. But Dolly made it cool.”

The movie might have been feminist. The song Parton wrote for it was not. Nearly every listener, regardless of gender, understood the lyric in her “9 to 5” portrait of the overworked and underappreciated employee: “You’re just a step on the bossman’s ladder.”

Amusingly, Parton had become a boss herself by the time she wrote it, hiring band members, assistants and employees for her own relatively small office. But she was still able to write “9 to 5” from the view of the oppressed.

“What this [songwriting] job is, it’s empathy,” Steve Earle noted. “A song like ‘9 to 5’ is sort of the ultimate statement of that. People don’t care about what happened to you [as a songwriter]. They care about what happened to you, that happened to them. That’s what the job is.”

Understanding the plight of blue-collar America wasn’t particularly difficult for Parton. She had, after all, grown up in a house that was so poor the family didn’t have a car or a TV. She would fight Nashville’s dismissive attitudes about women to break through, and as recently as 1974 — six years before she wrote and recorded “9 to 5” — she had still been an employee herself, arguing often with boss Porter Wagoner over the trajectory of her own creative career.

When she ragged on employers taking credit for their workers’ ideas in the text of “9 to 5” — “It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it” — she was saying something that nearly every laborer could understand. And it’s a message that still works in 2026.

“First of all, it’s written in American — not English, it’s written in American,” said songwriter Paul Williams (“Rainbow Connection,” “We’ve Only Just Begun”), who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame the same year as Parton and Willie Nelson . “There’s something about authenticity — when somebody speaks to you or sings to you in a voice that you know is real. She doesn’t read about what blue-collar life is like. She lived it.”

But one more key to the enduring popularity of “9 to 5” comes in its musicality. Despite the dead-end outlook in the lyrics, the melody is ascendant, the hook is easy, and the opening rhythms — including keyboard player Larry Knechtel’s driving eighth notes and producer Gregg Perry’s manual typing job — point toward the recording’s anthemic destination.

“It starts off and you know what it is,” said songwriter Blake Pendergrass (“Been by Now,” “Heart of Stone”). “A song like that, it kind of fits into the nursery-rhyme [scheme] where it’s just fun to sing. You know, there’s nobody that isn’t going to enjoy singing that.”

Appropriately, Dolly Day — and its “9 to 5” theme — arrive the same month as Labor Day. Parton knew how to relate to the middle class, even after she rose to a higher stratum.

“She was so good at common things for normal people,” said songwriter Lee Thomas Miller (“In Color,” “I’m Still a Guy”).

It’s why Parton’s first movie theme still works 45 years later. It fits any era, as Vince Gill noted, unwittingly punching the clock as he described “9 to 5.”

“It was,” Gill offered, “timeless.”

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/country/dolly-parton-9-to-5-endures-why-according-songwriters-1236347916/)._