In an earlier post, I looked at the names of holidays as they appear in the Reddit Corpus. Today, on this Easter Sunday, I look at the use of holiday names in songs from the Billboard year-end Top 30 charts (1951-2015).

As presented in the figure below, holidays do not appear frequently in the collection (keeping in mind that there are 1,950 songs in the corpus, comprising nearly 60,000 tokens).

As the figure shows, Christmas occurs the highest number of times (and in the greatest number of songs), followed by Fourth of July, Halloween, Labor Day, New Year's, and Easter.

The one song that Easter appears in is Rosemary Clooney's "Come On-a My House" (1951).

Hands down the most interesting use of a holiday name in the collection is in Ella Mae Morse's "Blacksmith Blues" (1952), with its line "See the hot sparks a-flying like Fourth of July-ing".

In future studies, we will return to the topic of holiday names in music as my pop music collection expands.