Dolly Parton – 9 To 5

The percussion on the biggest record of her career was a set of fingernails. The credits say so.

The clacking that opens the record is not a typewriter, and it is not a drum machine. It is Dolly Parton’s acrylic fingernails, played against one another like a washboard, and she was pleased enough with the result that the credits on the record read Nails by Dolly. She had written the song that way too, on a film set, between takes, with no instrument anywhere near her.

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She was on that set because Jane Fonda had wanted her there from the beginning. Fonda was building a comedy about three women and a monstrous boss, had Parton in mind before Parton had acted in anything, and offered her the film along with the theme song. Parton played Doralee Rhodes, a secretary the office believes is sleeping with her employer. Between setups she wandered around clicking her nails, a habit she had had for years, and the rhythm that came out of it suggested something specific to her. She later explained it plainly: they sound like a typewriter. Fonda’s account of the morning Parton showed them what she had is that she used her long nails as a washboard and sang it on the spot.

Gregg Perry, her musical director, produced the single. The session brought in Jeff Baxter on guitar, Larry Knechtel on piano, and Jerry Hey on trumpet, with Joey Scarbury among the backing vocalists months before his own Top 5 hit. RCA Nashville released it on November 3, 1980. It entered the Hot 100 at No. 73 in the week ending November 29, climbed for two months, and held No. 1 for two weeks in early 1981 across a twenty-six-week chart run. It topped the country chart, her thirteenth to do so, and Adult Contemporary as well. Britain took it to No. 47, which is the one number on the page that looks wrong and is nevertheless correct.

What the fingernails bought

Topping both the country chart and the Hot 100 with a single record put her in company of exactly one other woman. Jeannie C. Riley had done it in 1968 with “Harper Valley PTA,” a song Parton had covered on an album the following year. The Recording Academy gave her Best Country Song and Best Country Vocal Performance, Female, at the 1981 Grammy Awards, and the Academy nominated it for Best Original Song at the 53rd Academy Awards. It picked up a Golden Globe nomination and later served as the theme for the television series the film produced, across two separate runs in the 1980s. In Britain, Sheena Easton had released a song of her own called “9 to 5” — American labels retitled hers “Morning Train (Nine to Five)” to keep the two apart.

Parton died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at 80, after a brief illness. She had cancelled a Dollywood appearance earlier that month, and she had spent the previous year and a half without Carl Dean, the man she married in 1966 and who died in March 2025. She was born on January 19, 1946, the fourth of twelve children, in a one-room cabin in the Tennessee mountains, and she wrote somewhere north of three thousand songs between then and now.

Everything about the way she presented herself invited people to read her as decoration — the wigs, the rhinestones, the jokes she made about all of it before anyone else could. The manicure was part of that costume. On the biggest single of her life, the manicure was the rhythm section. She built a song about office work out of the only instrument she happened to have on her, in a room where she was supposed to be acting, and it has outlasted the typewriter, the carriage bell, and most of the offices it was written about.