Perhaps because it's Sunday, a conversation that a friend and I were having downtown today took a turn toward religion at some point. Which gave me the idea to look at how religious imagery has been presented in American popular music. So, you might not be surprised to learn that I turned to my collection of lyrics of songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015) to find out.

Well, what I found there was more data than I care to focus on at the moment (it being Sunday and all). So, I instead narrow the playing field to variants of the root word pray. I discovered that 115 variants of pray are used in 34 songs in the corpus, and their distribution from 1951 to 2015 looks like so:

Of the 115 tokens, 61 are the root form pray, 15 the past tense form prayed, 11 the progressive form praying, 27 the singular noun prayer, and 1 the plural noun prayers. In most of the songs, it is not stated who or what is being prayed to: God is explicitly stated in "I Miss You" (1986); Lord in "Crying in the Chapel" (1965), "Just My Imagination" (1971), "Here I Go Again" (1987), and "Blaze of Glory" (1990); and the heavens above in "Lonely Boy" (1959); there is also an implied link between praying and heaven in "Hands to Heaven" (1988). Although sometimes vague or implied as well, what characters in popular songs are praying for is explicitly stated more often than what they are praying to. In some cases, it is merely guidance that people are praying for, either for themselves, as in "The Three Bells" (1959), or others, as in "Vaya con Dios" (1953). Sometimes it's for salvation, as in "Blaze of Glory" (1990). And sometimes it's for strength, as in "Crying in the Chapel" (1965) and "Here I Come Again" (1987). But more often than not in pop lyrics, love is the object of prayers, and that love can be someone already known by the one praying, as in "Johnny Angel" (1962), "Just My Imagination" (1971), and "All My Life" (1998), or unknown, as in "Dream Lover" (1959), "Lonely Boy" (1959), and "Undercover Angel" (1977).

As Figure 1 above shows, there have been fluctuations over time in the number of references to praying are found in the lyric collection I am analyzing. The figure doesn't show clearly enough, perhaps, some of the trends: that the latter halves of the '60s, '80s, and '90s all had four-year runs in which references to prayer occurred in the most popular songs of each year.

The figure below presents these numbers by decade:

As the figure shows, pray and its variants had a fairly even run -- both by number of songs and total number of tokens -- through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, with a sharp increase in total number of tokens in the '80s (primarily owed to one song: Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" [1987]), and an even sharper increase in the '90s. However, this increase was met with its complete disappearance in the highest-ranked popular music of the aughts. The 15-year span in which there were no uses of pray and its variants in songs of Billboard's year-end Top Ten was ended in 2014 by 5th-ranked "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic.

And, on that note, I end this post with a video of a song referencing prayer, beginning with the great Les Paul and Mary Ford performing their 1953 hit, "Vaya con Dios."

And representing the 1960s:

The 1970s:

The 1980s, of course:

Lots of good ones from the 1990s, and despite having posted this previously, if any videos are going to represent this topic in the '90s, it's got to be "Tha Crossroads":

The Aughts:

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So, in their stead, I'll throw in another one from the '90s that I haven't heard in awhile, and have never posted:

The 2010s:

And as a bonus, here's another one from the 1980s, coming at you from across the pond:

As always, thanks to Clayton Darwin and BRDi tools for making these posts possible.