The four seasons in pop music
In celebration of the first day of spring (which in Wilmington has probably been the coldest, dreariest day in three weeks, of course), this post looks at occurrences of season names in the lyrics of songs from the Billboard year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015). First, the distribution of mentions of all seasons by decade:
Fig. 1: Distribution of all seasons throughout the decades by number of songs they occurred in and total number of occurrences (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)
The analysis proves the 1960s to be the decade with the greatest number of songs mentioning the seasons by name, although that number is almost matched by that of the 1990s. The 1950s and 1980s have the least number of references to the names of seasons in the corpus. In terms of total occurrences, the number in the 1960s greatly exceeds that of other decades; however, this is largely owing to two songs: The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" (1966) and Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun in the Summertime" (1969).
Fig. 2: Distribution of each season name by number of songs and total number of instances (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)
The analysis shows that summer(time) has the greatest presence in the collection, both in terms of the number of songs that make reference to it and the total number of times it occurs in the collection. Fall is mentioned the least of the four seasons (and autumn is never mentioned). In the middle of these two extremes are winter and spring, with the former being mentioned a greater number of times than spring (again owing in great part to "California Dreamin'") and the latter occurring in a greater number of songs.
The seven songs that refer to spring are as follows (in chronological order):
And as your bonus, possibly my favorite Four Seasons song: