Dolly Parton died August 25 at eighty, and the tributes were universal — Empire State Building lit pink, flags at half-staff, politicians from both parties lining up. Jarek Paul Ervin’s eulogy cuts through the niceness: Parton was “one of the most consistent voices for working-class people,” a writer who turned ordinary working-class women into the narrators of heroic ballads.
Her songbook did the work:
- “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” — farm families watching their crops beaten by hail, too poor for the doctor.
- “Coat of Many Colors” — childhood poverty as quiet defiance; “Daddy’s Working Boots” — an ode to toil and sacrifice.
- “Jolene” — a woman’s fear of being left behind.
- “9 to 5” — “trapped in a rich man’s game,” written on set and credited for “nails” (her fingernail clicks mimicked a typewriter); number one on three Billboard charts.
- The 1980 film’s fantasy: three office women kidnap their boss and institute fair pay, better hours, and on-site childcare.
Parton was no leftist — she refused politics, and her 2021 Squarespace rework of “9 to 5” (“be your own boss”) was rightly mocked; David Sirota called it the most dystopian ad he had ever seen. Ervin reads that tension as country music’s own: a genre that captures working-class life better than most yet keeps resolving pain into status-quo traditionalism.
The closing point is aimed at the Left itself: art does not need to be a political sermon, but poverty, injustice, labor exploitation, and working-class pride are still too rare on today’s charts — and in the Left’s own sense of who its audience is. “It wouldn’t hurt the Left to steal a page from her songbook.”