Today marks the anniversary of the ascendancy of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne of England, which occurred in 1952. Well, I don't know much about royalty or how all that business works, but I decided that I could take this opportunity to learn about how royal titles are used in pop music, by investigating their appearance in the lyrics of songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015).

To do so, I conducted a search in the lyric collection for a list of words that included king, queen, prince, princess, earl, duke, crown, etc. The results of the search culminated in a rather small dataset. I expected few if any of the words to refer to any actual members of any royal family, and in fact, there turned out to be none; rather, the words were used in metaphors and idioms.*

Figure 1 shows the relevant terms that were found in the collection and their ranking. Queen leads the pack in both number of songs and total number of occurrences, followed closely by king, before dropping significantly to the ranks of princess and knight,  as well as crown, which is sometimes used as a generic name for the highest-ranking royal.

Thus, we can see that the use of royal titles has escalated over time, with their highest performance in the 2010s, despite being only at the halfway mark of the decade.

The performances of just king and queen over time are shown in the figure below:

As shown, there has been a change from the exclusive focus on king in the 1950s to the greater focus on queen in the 2010s. To be sure, there is not a lot of data to be studied in this regard, and the fact is that the two words often occur together in songs where they do occur. A look at this topic in the Top Thirty in a future exercise might shed more light on this area.

Finally, an interesting thing about royal titles in the dataset is how they combine with other words to form compound nouns and longer phrases, as presented in the table below.

I close out with two videos of songs that mention royalty in their lyrics: one being a favorite of mine from the collection that was just investigated, and one simply because I like it.

For a word search on royal titles in pop music, click here.

* The search also produced several false positives, that is, search terms that appeared in the song but not with the meaning I had intended, particularly as actual names. For example, earl was found in "My True Story" (1961) in the line "His name was Earl, his love was Lorraine"; other false positives included six occurrences of king in the line "Badder than old King Kong" in "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" (1973), and the word count resulted in nothing but false positives related to counting rather than to royalty.