Dolly Parton has always been a idol of mine, partly for her gifted-by-God voice and incredible songwriting ability, but more so for her uniquely Tennessean flavor of sass. She was born in the southern end of Appalachia, raised in poverty as one of 12 children, brought up in the Church of God, married only once (to Carl Dean), and never divorced. Despite being the most honored female country singer of all time, she has somehow managed to remain centered. She reminds me a lot of women I knew growing up: proper, demure, and well-mannered when you’re acting right (or when it suits her), and a kerosene-drenched spitfire when you ain’t acting right (or it just doesn’t suit).
Dolly says “bless your heart,” and you understand full well that what she means is “eat sh*t and die,” but you just can’t help but be besotted anyway.
My pick for today is her 1980 hit “9 to 5.” Here it is:
First, I want to note that the tapping-and-dinging typewriter effect at the beginning of this song is absolutely brilliant and whichever sound engineer thought it up deserves a Grammy for that alone. (“9 to 5” did earn Parton an Academy Award nomination and two Grammy awards.) But the real brilliance of this song, and the reason it’s come to occupy a privileged place in my estimation of late, is its unapologetic accounting of women’s unappreciated, underpaid, exploited and expropriated work.
It’s a rich man’s game, no matter what you call it.
It can be downright infuriating to think how little has changed for working women in the United States since 1980, but as I’ve approached– okay, now fully arrived at— middle age, I often find myself more exasperated than angry. I don’t want to be exasperated. I don’t want to be resigned to the default reality, so true for women in academia, that “they let you dream just to watch them shatter.” Even less do I want to just sit in the boat with a lot of my friends, like Dolly sings, sharing some pink-hued pipe-dream that “the tide’s gonna turn and it’s all gonna go our way.”
But it is soooooo exhausting– for a thousand meaningful reasons and an infinite number of mundane ones– to stay vigilant, to stay angry, to keep objecting, to keep refusing, to push back, to maintain the pressure of resistance,. Thankfully, “9 to 5” is a kind of Old School feminist war-song that has slowly crept back into my life and back into my regular music rotation of late, and I am no doubt the better for it.
Because one thing that Dolly gets dead-right is that being a working women in this world is enough to drive you crazy if you let it.
Runners-up for #30DaySongChallenge, Day 2:
