About The Song
The song, a salute to the America's blue-collar workers, became Alabama's 17th No. 1 song on August 3, spending one week atop the chart. The end of the song includes a few bars from "America the Beautiful."
Country music historian Bill Malone, in his liner notes for Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection, wrote that "40 Hour Week (For a Livin')" "...is a rare country music tribute to American workers. (It) probably owes its popularity as much to its patriotic sentiments as to its social concern." Malone also noted that, with few exceptions, "almost no one in country music has spoken for the industrial laborer," one of the main groups of workers Alabama salutes in this song. "This straightforward homage gives the contemporary worker the respect that the Reagan years denied him," Malone concluded.
Read more about this topic: 40 Hour Week (For A Livin')
Famous quotes containing the word song:
“Even their song is not a sure thing.
It is not a language;
it is a kind of breathing.
They are two asthmatics
whose breath sobs in and out
through a small fuzzy pipe.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)