Nashville Marks 9/25 as a Date Written Into Dolly Parton's '9 to 5'

The date did the work. On Sept. 25, 2026 — 9/25, read aloud as "nine to five" — people in Nashville and other cities celebrated Dolly Parton, the Queen of Country, in a nod to her signature song about working women.

The observance aired Sept. 25 at 4:08 PM ET on NPR's "All Things Considered," in a segment reported by Marianna Bacallao of WPLN News, Nashville's public radio station. The piece ran roughly four minutes and framed the calendar coincidence as an occasion for tribute rather than an official holiday.

The choice of date is the point. "9 to 5," Parton's 1980 anthem of office workers pushed past their limit, gave the numerals their meaning; the celebration inverts that logic, using 9/25 as shorthand for the song itself. Nashville, Parton's longtime home and the center of the country music industry, served as the hub of the commemorations, with Bacallao's reporting noting that celebrations also took place in other places.

The moment lands at the end of a month of national attention to Parton's legacy. NPR has published a cluster of remembrances and reappraisals in recent weeks: an opinion piece titled "Remembering Dolly Parton" on Aug. 29; a Culture desk retrospective, "A look back at '9 To 5' — Dolly Parton's working women's anthem," on Aug. 25; a "Bullseye with Jesse Thorn" episode devoted to remembering the singer on Sept. 7; and a Planet Money bonus episode, "Dolly Parton's '9 to 5,' the true story behind the anthem," on Aug. 30.

The Planet Money installment signals how far the song has traveled from the country charts into labor economics; the Culture desk piece explicitly casts it as a working women's anthem. Taken together, the coverage treats "9 to 5" as the lens through which Parton is currently being assessed — a workplace protest song that doubled as a chart smash.

For Nashville, the Sept. 25 celebration functions as a civic gesture keyed to the city's most famous resident musician. The format echoes other calendar-driven observances tied to song titles and cultural figures, in which a date's numerals prompt collective listening and tribute.

What distinguishes this one is the song's subject. Parton wrote "9 to 5" about the working day, and the celebration honors her on a date that mirrors it — an annual occasion that, if it takes hold, will return each Sept. 25 with the anthem at its center.