Trucker song by Croce-Speedball Tucker
Mississippi Queen - Mountain
Pretty sure she was a prostitute.
The Humans Are Dead - Flight of the Conchords being robots
Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous - Flight of the Conchords claiming to be rap singers
If we’re allowing musical theatre, there’s a great song about being a dentist
Weird Al
Truck Driving Song
Pretty Fly For A Rabbi
Lady Marmalade - another hooker
Gris-gris Gumbo Ya Ya and I Walk on Gilded Splinters by Dr. John - Voodoo priest
I always thought Lawyers, Guns, and Money was about some preppy brat who’d gotten into way over their head while wasting away in some foreign country. “Dad, get me out of this.” Which I guess makes it even more appropriate if it were about the CIA.
More Zevon. Seminole Bingo is narrated by a “junk-bond king” on the run from the SEC, and who falls “in love with the ping pong balls.”
Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song) is about a hockey ‘goon’, who plays a lengthy career in professional hockey, but never got a chance to score a goal. Until one night…
Siouxsie and The Banshees, “Peek-A-Boo”, is about a dancer in a peepshow.
Ebony Eyes by Everly Brothers mentions the chaplain, the airline flight desk agent, and the flight PA announcer
Don Williams, Good Ole Boys Like me, learned to talk like “the man on the 6 oclock news”
Marvelettes, Please Mr Postman
Shirelles, "Soldier Boy.
BJ the DJ
Tennessee Ernie Ford, coal miner, 16 Tons
Jimmy Driftwood implies the profession of “pretty girls from France” that the victorious soldiers danced with after “Batttle of New Orleans”
I always thought it was about a drug dealer. Some guy in his twenties who thought he could make a lot of money and got in way over his head. “The Russians” are members of a gang.
If the guy was a spy, he’d be calling his controller for help rather than his Dad.
I think you have that backwards: he’s a guy who commutes to a 9-to-5 job who would love to be a musician because they don’t do any real work (it’s as easy as fishin’).
Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter mentions several other jobs as well.
I’m The Girl Who Makes The Thing
Ol’ Man River (tote that barge, lift that bale)
You Don’t Mess Around With Jim, by Jim Croce - pool hustlers
The Gambler, by Kenny Rodgers - a gambler
Armoured car driver - Blondie ‘Hardest part’ - ‘the hardest part of the armoured car - big man of steel behind the steering wheeeeeel’.
Secretaries - Dolly Parton - ‘9 to 5’.
Artist-sculptor - Dire Straits - ‘In the Gallery’ [album - Sultans of Swing]
Anthropologist - Floyd Red Crow Westerman - ‘Here come the anthros’
Kamikaze pilot - Hoodoo Gurus - ‘I was a kamikaze pilot’ [album - Stoneage Romeos]
President - Paul Simon - ‘Loves me like a rock’
Not a character from a song, but one of my favorite words. From The Spirit of Radio by Rush there is salesmen.
Another favorite word is Roxanne, who is a prostitute.
Harry Chapin’s A Better Place to Be - the protagonist is the midnight watchman (down at Miller’s Tool and Die). And 50,000 Pounds of Bananas is about a truck driver.
Regards,
Shodan
Now Jack, he is a banker,
And Jane, she is a clerk.
(Sweet Jane)
There’s the Sam Cooke classic song Chain Gang that is about men working on a chain gang, complete with their grunts.
Or Big Bad John, the coal miner who “saved 21 men from a would-be grave” in a shaft collapse.
And of course that leads to John Henry, that mighty steel-drivin’ man with a hammer in his hand, but that’s basically a folk song, if that counts.
Ernie Ford’s classic song Sixteen Tons doesn’t specify a job, but it’s clearly about someone doing manual labor with a shovel at a mine for low wages (“I owe my soul to the company store…”)
Johnny Horton has a similar sounding song from the same era, North To Alaska (from the soundtrack of the movie of the same name), is about Sam McCord (who “was a mighty man in the year of nineteen-one”) who was a gold prospector in the Yukon Territory “just a little southeast of Nome”.
Also, Hackensack:
I used to work in a record store
Now I work for my dad
Scraping the paint off of hard wood floors
And from the Replacements, Waitress In the Sky (flight attendant).
Here’s a fun one: CAKE has a song Comfort Eagle about the cynical packaging and marketing side of the music industry.
Which is also the topic of Billy Joel’s song, The Entertainer. (“I know the game, and you’ll forget my name - I won’t be here in another year, if I don’t stay on the charts”)