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Dolly Parton Understood That Working 9 to 5 Doesn’t Really Pay the Bills in Today’s America

Social mobility has ground to a halt. Why that’s lousy for American music.

Near the end of her life, Dolly Parton was among America’s wealthiest self-made women—a musician with over 100 million records sold and a savvy entrepreneur helming a large business empire. But throughout her long career, she highlighted her hardscrabble origins in rural Tennessee, as one of 11 children in a sharecropping family that got up “before sunup to get the work done up” to “work in the fields ’til the sun had gone down.”

Along with artists like Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and Biggie Smalls, Parton was part of an American tradition that’s found musicians earning worldwide acclaim for songs that speak to their working-class roots, from the Arkansas cotton fields to New Jersey’s factory towns and Brooklyn’s disinvested streets.

They’ve been embraced by audiences across generations, in part because their music is rooted in experiences that are all too universal—hard work that doesn’t pay as well as it should; families and communities that are vibrant, yet struggling day-to-day. But as the cost of living rises and with creative fields threatened by AI, it’s becoming more and more difficult for musicians and artists to get by. This is a burden that falls disproportionately on those without means—and it’s imperiling the nation’s proud history of working-class artistry.

Though Parton’s rags-to-riches story may lend itself to a bootstraps narrative—that, with enough elbow grease, anyone can make it on their own—her success came during a period of American class ascendancy and support for the arts.

Born in 1946 in the wake of the New Deal and coming of age in 1964 at the dawn of the Great Society and the War on Poverty, Parton emerged at a moment in history when the........

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