As we near the end of the first month of 2016, and as a follow-up my earlier posts on days of the week in Top Ten lyrics and holidays in the Reddit corpus, I take a look here at the names of months that are used in pop music. Because months don't appear as often as days do in the Top Ten collection, I expanded the scope of my search to a collection of the 1,950 songs that make up Billboard's year-end Top Thirty charts (1951-2015). In subsequent posts, I will be alternating between the Top Ten and Top Thirty collections based on the kind of question I am trying to answer.

The figure below answers the question of how months are distributed in the collection, in terms of both the number of songs month names occur in and the total number of occurrences in those songs.  

The names of months appear a total of 54 times in 38 songs in the collection. As illustrated, both June and July are used in the highest number of songs (at seven each), with the former enjoying a greater number of tokens in the collection (at twelve) than the latter (at eight). April, May, and September occur in six songs apiece, with September having the highest total number of tokens among months in the collection, with fourteen. The numbers drop off markedly for the lower-ranking months, with January, February, and December occurring in two songs apiece; August and November in one song each; and neither March nor October appearing in any of the 1,950 songs in the collection. Clearly the spring and summer months between April and September are favored in pop songs, which was not unexpected, although it is surprising that August gets shortchanged in this regard (and when it does occur in the collection, it does so in Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You," which, far from singling out August, mentions three other months as well). I also found it surprising that December didn't outperform the other low-ranking months, given its inclusion of two of the country's most popular holidays and the apparent link between those holidays and music.

So how does the use of months in the Top Thirty compare to that of days in the Top Ten? If you remember the post on days (and if you don't, here's a link), then you might remember how a single song covered all the bases by mentioning every one of the days of the week (The Black-Eyed Peas' "Got a Feeling"). There is no song in the collection that does the same for months, which, at the very least, would have helped March and October out. However, there are a couple of songs -- in addition to the aforementioned Wonder song (which appeared in the 1984 charts and refers to April, June, July, August) -- that include references to multiple months: "Moments to Remember" (1955: January and December) and "Saint George and the Dragonet" (1953: July and September). And just as the name of one of the days appears in the title of a song in the collection, namely "Monday, Monday", so too do some songs have the names of months in their titles: "See You in September" (1966), "November Rain" (1992), and "December 1963" (1976).

I should mention that one of the reasons for April ranking high with respect to the use of months is that the lyrics of a single song reference that month was recorded by two different artists and charted in the year-end Top Thirty twice in the same year, which was not uncommon in the earlier pop music history, particularly in the 1940s and ‘50s. The song is "(It's No) Sin," and its hit versions were recorded by The Four Aces, whose version appeared at #21 on the year-end Top 30 charts for 1953, and Eddy Howard, whose version appeared at #16 that same year.

All but one of the references to months that are highlighted here are bare forms of the name of the month, which is to say they are all singular forms, such as May, rather than plural forms, such as Mays. One exception to this needs to be mentioned, however, since it illustrates an interesting linguistic phenomenon. This is the use of Julying as a verb in the phrase Fourth of Julying in Ella Mae Morse's "Blacksmith Blues" (1952).

Finally, here are videos of a couple relatively recent songs that mention the months January and February, respectively, as we make our way from one to the other this year.

For a word search on the names of months in pop lyrics, click here.