No Matter How Things Change, Someone Is Singin’ That Song

They’re making it hard on the working man

Trying to make a living any way he can

Making ends meet on the installment plan

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The way country and western singers tell it, wages are lousy, jobs are scarce and beer is too expensive. But long before John Connie put the song “Working Man” on the charts in the mid-1980s, the American worker’s plight was already well documented in popular culture.

Bosses are skinflints. Just look at George Jetson’s boss at Spacely Sprockets. He sent George--chair and all--flying from his office whenever poor George asked for a raise. Or consider Dagwood Bumstead’s boss, Mr. Dithers. No doubt Dagwood’s perpetual desire to doze stems from a stress-related work disorder. And don’t forget that lovable shnook Fred Flintstone. After a day of toil in a rock quarry, who wouldn’t holler “yabba-dabba-doo”?

Be it country and western ditty, cartoon or television sitcom, the message is the same--office drudges and blue-collar guys, like Ralph Kramden, are in a jam. They work hard and have little to show for it. Garth S. Jowett, a history professor at the University of Houston who studies popular culture, says, “In our culture, work is typically portrayed as an unwelcome intrusion that one must endure.”

No wonder so many country songs romanticize the cowboy or trucker, jobs in which a man is his own boss and can pass through the country’s wide-open spaces.

But if the cliche boss is a bum, the cliche wage earner has almost always been a man. Archie Bunker and Ozzie Nelson may have little in common, but Archie came home expecting a hot meal from Edith, and Ozzie returned home wanting dinner prepared by Harriet.

For years, music, cartoons and television depicted women as little more than lovers, wives, sisters or prostitutes. In the Brooks and Dunn hit “Hard Working Man,” a man is someone who can “ride, rope, hammer and paint.” By contrast, a woman’s job is to provide comfort for her hard-working man.

Come Friday night

I like to party hard

I carry on with the Cadillac cuties

I’ll spend a whole week’s pay on some weekend beauty

But country music has changed, says expert Jimmie N. Rogers, a communications teacher at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Listen to a top 10 country song today and the lyrics are just as likely to describe a single mother with two kids to feed as it is about a man’s struggle to support his family.

Starting sometime in the 1970s, says Rogers, pop culture started to recognize that holding down a job and supporting a family is rough for both sexes. Single woman Mary Tyler Moore landed a job in Minneapolis as a television news producer. Bonnie Franklin raised two daughters on her own in “One Day at a Time.” And country songs like “No Man’s Land” told the story of a single mom, “With three little kids and no one to help. Tryin’ to be Momma and Daddy all by herself.”

By the 1990s, women as diverse as Roseanne and Blondie got jobs and helped support their families.

The debate over what is “men’s work” versus “women’s work” is a bit amusing to Jowett, the historian. “The whole notion that men go off to work and women stay home is a very modern idea,” Jowett says. “Before the industrial revolution, work and home life intermingled.”

A cobbler lived above his shop, a farmer tilled the fields near his home. Few workers, he explains, left their homes to work. And whatever work was done in their shop or field was typically shared by both men and women.

It wasn’t until the arrival of power looms, cotton gins and steam engines that workers had to punch in at a factory at a specific time. One consequence of this shift is that it raised the question of who would stay home to watch the babies.

Technology fueled the Industrial Revolution and introduced new plot twists and characters to American popular culture. With the man off at work, the “wayward wife” emerged as a new stock character. Another relatively new theme is the idea that a man needs the support of a strong woman. Alice Kramden, Blondie and Wilma Flintstone are all wives whose role was to save Ralph, Dagwood and Fred from losing their jobs or launching some new harebrained scheme. Jowett says that in the typical scenario, “Men are often competent at their jobs, but revert to being idiots at home.”

Progress, if you would call it that, says Rogers, is that women in the 1990s are shown wanting the same things as men--beer, freedom and a date. In Patty Loveless’ song “The Night’s Too Long,” Sylvia, a waitress-turned-office worker, stops off at a bar after work:

And with her back against the bar

She can listen to the band

And she’s holdin’ a Corona

And it’s cold against her hand.

Gali Kronenberg is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The Times. He can be reached at [email protected]