“Love at the Five and Dime” – A Tender Chronicle of Ordinary Lives and Enduring Devotion
Released in 1986 as the lead single from The Last of the True Believers, Nanci Griffith’s luminous ballad “Love at the Five and Dime” stands as one of the most eloquent portraits of working-class romance ever written in American folk music. The song climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart in early 1986, marking Griffith’s first Top 10 country hit and introducing her storytelling gifts to a wider Nashville audience. It remains her highest-charting single, a commercial breakthrough that never compromised her literary soul.
At its heart, “Love at the Five and Dime” is a novella in miniature. With a voice as clear as prairie light, Nanci Griffith sketches the lives of Rita and Eddie from teenage infatuation to late-life endurance. The opening lines are disarmingly simple: a sixteen-year-old girl with hazel eyes and chestnut hair, polishing the Woolworth counter until it shines. A young steel guitar player who waltzes with her down the aisles of the five-and-dime store. From those modest beginnings, Griffith unfolds decades of shared joy, betrayal, reconciliation, loss, and ultimately steadfast companionship.
The setting itself carries weight. The Woolworth counter and the five-and-dime store evoke mid-century small-town America, when love blossomed under fluorescent lights and courtship happened between jukebox songs. By 1986, when the song reached the airwaves, such stores were already fading into memory. Griffith understood the quiet poetry of these disappearing spaces. She did not romanticize poverty, nor did she sentimentalize hardship. Instead, she dignified it. In her hands, ordinary lives acquired epic resonance.
Musically, the track bridges folk and country traditions with elegance. The arrangement is understated: gentle acoustic guitar, steel guitar lines that shimmer like distant highway lights, and a steady rhythm that mirrors the passing years. Griffith’s phrasing is conversational yet precise, her Texas twang carrying both warmth and restraint. She never overstates emotion. When Rita and Eddie lose a child in Tennessee, the tragedy is delivered plainly, almost casually. That narrative restraint makes the sorrow more piercing. Life moves on, the waltz continues, and the chorus returns like a familiar refrain: “Dance a little closer to me… love’s on sale tonight at this five and dime.”
The chorus itself is deceptively bright. On first listen, it sounds like a young couple’s flirtation at closing time. Yet as the song progresses, those lines gather deeper meaning. “Closing time” becomes a metaphor for aging, for the narrowing hours of a shared life. The five-and-dime becomes a symbol of modest means and humble beginnings, but also of constancy. Even when Eddie strays and Rita’s heart is wounded, the story circles back to reconciliation. He returns by June, singing a different tune. The dance resumes. Griffith does not judge her characters. She observes them with compassion.
One of the song’s most moving passages arrives near the end. Arthritis takes Eddie’s hands, silencing his steel guitar. He sells insurance now. Rita keeps house and reads dime-store novels. They dance to the radio late at night. There is no grandeur here, no dramatic finale. Just two people who have weathered storms and still find comfort in a shared melody. Griffith closes the narrative by returning to the beginning, repeating the image of Rita at sixteen and Eddie waltzing through the aisles. The circular structure reinforces the idea that memory and love are intertwined, that the first dance and the last are reflections of one another.
In the broader arc of Nanci Griffith’s career, “Love at the Five and Dime” represents her rare alignment with mainstream country radio while maintaining the literate sensibility that defined her as a key figure in the folk revival of the 1980s. The album The Last of the True Believers, produced by Marshall Morgan, cemented her reputation as a songwriter of unusual narrative depth. Griffith would later be associated with the “folkabilly” movement, but this song transcends genre labels. It belongs to a tradition that includes small-town balladeers and great American storytellers alike.
Decades later, “Love at the Five and Dime” endures because it refuses spectacle. It trusts in detail. It believes that the lives lived quietly, far from headlines and bright marquees, are worthy of song. In listening today, one hears not only Rita and Eddie, but echoes of countless couples who met under modest circumstances and discovered that love, even when imperfect, can outlast youth, disappointment, and time itself. The dance continues.
Oldies Songs