Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we honor the late, great Dolly Parton, whose workers anthem “9 to 5” reached No. 1 in February 1981.
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Dolly Parton was well on her way to becoming a crossover superstar when the movie 9 to 5 was released in December 1980. She had reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1978 with “Here You Come Again,” a winsome pop song written by the great team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But 9 to 5 took her to another level. She more than held her own with two superstars, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. She was great in her role as Doralee Rhodes, a secretary who is perennially harassed by her boss from hell, Frank Hart (played by Dabney Coleman).
But her biggest contribution to the film may have been writing and performing its letter-perfect title song. It was one of the biggest and best hits that Parton, who died on Tuesday (Aug. 26) at age 80, ever had.
The song suits the film perfectly – it’s uptempo, which is ideal for a comedy. It distills and advances the film’s central theme – how workers are often taken advantage of in the workplace. (Both the film and the song owe their titles to 9to5, an organization founded in 1973 to bring about fair pay and equal treatment for women in the workplace.) But the song is more nuanced than, say, Johnny Paycheck’s recording of David Allan Coe’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” another country crossover hit that reached No. 1 on Hot Country Songs in January 1978.
Parton wisely opened the song with a verse that is completely universal about worklife, saving more specific complaints for later. She opens with clever rhymes and witty wordplay: “Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen/ Pour myself a cup of ambition/ And yawn and stretch and try to come to life.”
In the chorus, she begins the litany of complaints: “Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’/ Barely getting by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’/ They just use your mind and they never give you credit…” But the very next line contains a glimmer of hope: “It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.” The clear implication: don’t let it. (Parton also lays in hopeful messages in the second verse: “But you’ve got dreams he’ll never take away/ In the same boat with a lot of your friends/ Waitin’ for the day your ship’ll come in/ And the tide’s gonna turn an’ it’s all gonna roll your way.”)
The song mixes blunt talk that almost makes Parton sound like a union organizer (“It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it/ And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet”) with glimmers of the hope and optimism that were at the core of who Parton was as a person. On paper, the lyrics read as borderline-angry in spots, but Parton doesn’t sing it that way. Her charm and warmth, her audible smile, all soften the impact of her words.
It was Fonda’s idea to cast Parton in the film, and the role was written with her in mind. Parton wrote the song on the set of the film. She has often explained that she devised the clacking typewriter rhythm by running her acrylic fingernails back and forth against each other.
In the 2019 BBC documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am, Fonda explained how the casting came together in early 1978. “I was driving home from having just seen Lily Tomlin for the first time in her one-woman show called Appearing Nitely, and I was totally smitten by Lily. … I turn on the radio. [Parton’s] ‘Two Doors Down’ is playing, and I suddenly get an image of Dolly Parton sitting at a typewriter, and I thought that would be something – Dolly Parton in her first movie playing a secretary in a movie that, among many other things, is going to touch upon sexual harassment. She’s perfect.”
In that doc, Parton said that she pushed to write the title song. “When Jane came to me with it, I said, ‘Well, this is a good opportunity, but I will only do it if I can write the theme song.’ So they said, ‘Okay.’”
Fonda and Tomlin knew the song was a home run the moment they heard it. Fonda remembered “the morning that Dolly came to work and motioned us over, and just outside the set, she said, ‘I’ve just written the song, and she used her long nails as a washboard, and she sang ‘9 to 5.’ And Lily and I looked at each other, and we had goosebumps.”
Tomlin added: “[We] were just flabbergasted. We thought it was so great. I said to Jane, ‘This will make the movie a hit, if nothing else.’ And we knew this is not just a movie song. This is an anthem.”
Gregg Perry, Parton’s long-time musical director and occasional producer, produced Parton’s single. The track featured such pros as guitarist Jeff Baxter, pianist Larry Knechtel and trumpeter Jerry Hey. Joey Scarbury, who would land a No. 2 Hot 100 hit in August 1981 with “Theme From Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not),” was among the backup singers.
The song entered the Hot 100 at No. 73 in the week ending Nov. 29, 1980. It was the week’s second-highest debut, behind Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen.” In the week ending Feb. 14, 1981, the song jumped from No. 4 to No. 2, becoming Parton’s highest-charting hit to that point. The following week, it hit No. 1, bumping off Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration.”
After one week on top, it was in turn displaced by Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night.” Rabbitt’s song was No. 1 for two weeks, before “9 to 5” regained the top spot in the week ending March 14, 1981. After those two nonconsecutive weeks on top, “9 to 5” was dislodged by REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You,” the lead single from the year’s biggest album, Hi Infidelity.
“9 to 5” was just the second song by a female artist to reach No. 1 on both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs, following Jeannie C. Riley’s 1968 smash “Harper Valley P.T.A.” (which, come to think of it, was also a message song, about mean-spirited gossip and hypocrisy). Fun Fact: Parton had covered Riley’s hit (which was written by Tom T. Hall) on her 1969 album In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).
The early ’80s was a fertile period for country crossover success. Parton’s future duet partner Kenny Rogers was one of the hottest recording stars in any genre. The Urban Cowboy soundtrack spawned six top 40 hits on the Hot 100, including Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love” and Anne Murray’s Grammy-winning “Could I Have This Dance.”
The success of “9 to 5” forced Sheena Easton’s camp to amend the title of her U.K. smash of the same name when it was released in the U.S. in February 1981. It became “Morning Train (Nine to Five).” The name change didn’t hurt the song’s commercial prospects: Easton’s hit also topped the Hot 100, less than three months after Parton’s song reached No. 1.
The spunky “9 to 5” was Parton’s only solo No. 1 hit on the Hot 100, though her Rogers collab “Islands in the Stream,” also reached No. 1 in 1983. (You can read all about its journey to the top of the Hot 100 here.)
“9 to 5” was the centerpiece of Parton’s album 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, which was her sixth solo studio album in less than four years, since she first set her sights on pop crossover in early 1977. The album reached No. 11 on the Billboard 200, Parton’s highest ranking to that point.
Parton received three Golden Globe nominations for her work in the film: best original song, motion picture (“9 to 5” lost to Dean Pitchford and Michael Gore’s title song from Fame, a top five hit on the Hot 100 for Irena Cara); new star of the year – actress (she lost to Nastassja Kinski, who appeared in Tess); and best performance by an actress in a motion picture – musical or comedy (she lost to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter). The latter contest was interesting: An all-time country legend lost to an actress portraying another all-time country legend, Loretta Lynn.
“9 to 5” was also nominated for an Oscar for best original song. As at the Globes, it lost to “Fame.” (Another country legend, Willie Nelson, was also in the running with “On the Road Again” from Honeysuckle Rose.) There have been many years when none of the nominees were really deserving of an Oscar. Here, there were three nominees that were eminently worthy.
Parton’s nominations were the film’s only nods at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars. “9 to 5” did win favorite song from a motion picture at the then-top-rated People’s Choice Awards.
“9 to 5” also brought Parton her second Grammy win in the best female country vocal performance category (she had won in 1979 for “Here You Come Again”) and her first and only win for best country song. “9 to 5” was also nominated in the all-genre song of the year category, but lost to “Bette Davis Eyes,” which Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon had written seven years before Kim Carnes turned it into a Hot 100-topping 1981 smash.
“9 to 5” was nominated for both single record of the year and song of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 1981. Parton was also nominated for entertainer of the year and won female vocalist of the year for the first time. In 2004, “9 to 5” ranked No. 78 on the American Film Institute’s “100 Years … 100 Songs” list.
The film grossed more than $100 million, making it the second highest-grossing film of 1980, just behind The Empire Strikes Back, according to boxofficemojo.com. It remains a cult favorite. It finished No. 74 on AFI’s “100 Years…100 Laughs” list of the funniest films of all time. (It was the third funniest film of 1980, according to that list, behind Airplane! and Caddyshack.)
While the film received mixed reviews at the time, just about everybody agreed it was well-acted. And most critics singled out Parton. Roger Ebert called her “a natural-born movie star” who “contains so much energy, so much life and unstudied natural exuberance that watching her do anything in this movie is a pleasure.”
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune agreed, saying “The most pleasant surprise is the appearance of Dolly Parton, who with this one film establishes herself as a thoroughly engaging movie star.”
9 to 5 was adapted into a TV sitcom, which debuted in 1982. The TV show featured Rachel Dennison, Parton’s younger sister, in Parton’s role. A musical theater adaptation of the film, featuring 20 additional songs written by Parton, opened in Los Angeles in September 2008 and played on Broadway for five months in 2009. There was talk of a sequel to the film. It never came to pass, though the three actresses reunited in 2022 when Parton appeared in the final episode of the long-running comedy series Grace and Frankie, in which Fonda and Tomlin had starred.
A clever postscript at the end of 9 to 5 told of the character’s fates: Violet (played by Tomlin) was promoted to vice president. Judy (played by Fonda) marries the Xerox representative. Doralee (Parton’s character) leaves Consolidated Companies to become “a country western singer.”
In real life, this was the moment when Parton moved from being a country singer (the term “country western” was pretty dated by that point) to becoming one of the biggest and most beloved stars in any genre, in any medium — a status she never relinquished.
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