It was on this day in 1961 that President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps. In order to commemorate the event, this post looks at the distribution of the word peace in songs from the Billboard year-end Top 30 charts (1951-2015). Figure 1 shows its distribution in terms of number of songs and total number of instances through the years.

Fig. 1: Distribution of peace in the Top 30 (1951 to 2015) by # of songs and # of instances (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 1: Distribution of *peace* in the Top 30 (1951 to 2015) by # of songs and # of instances (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Peace is used 65 times in 39 songs in the collection. As shown in the figure, the word's highest single performance by year is in 1966; however, it is not used in songs in the collection from 1956 to 1964. The word also does not appear in songs of the collection that charted between 1981 and 1987.

Figure 2 shows the performance of the word peace in the collection by decade.

Fig. 2: Performance of peace Top 30 songs through the decades (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 2: Performance of *peace* Top 30 songs through the decades (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As shown in the figure, overall performance of peace is highest in the 1960s, which should be unsurprising, given its performance in 1966 and its association with the decade overall; however, the number of songs including the term in the 1950s matches that of the 1960s and the number of songs it appears in in the 1990s surpasses it, even if only just barely. Thus, performance of the word peace seems to be cyclical; peaking in the 1960s and 1990s and decreasing in subsequent decades.

It is true, however, that not all instances of peace are created the same in the collection: in several songs, namely, "War" (1970), "Sweet Love" (1976), "I Want to be Rich" (1990), and "Where Is the Love?" (2003), peace appears within three words of love (on either side), as well as words such as understanding and happiness. On the other hand, in several of the most recent songs that use the word, namely, "Dani California" (2006), "Empire State of Mind" (2010), "The Motto" (2012), and "Black Widow" (2014), peace occurs in the epitaph "rest in peace."

To close, videos of a few of the 13 songs from Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015) containing the word peace.

And, of course, the nearly obligatory bonus video, from Room 1742 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on June 1, 1969 (two years to the day after the release of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band):

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