In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I decided to do a search in my collections of pop lyrics for references to Dr. King. Alas, there were none. So I devised a Plan B. I went to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. site and downloaded the six texts from the "Text of Speeches and Writing" tab, plus his "I Have a Dream" speech. Then I ran them through the AntConc software to find the top words in the collection. Using Ted Pederson's stop list to separate the wheat (content words) from the chaff (function words), I arrived at the following Top 20 content words for the King collection:

god, life, negro, people, day, freedom, know, white, man, law, men, church, great, think, birmingham, nation, love, justice, new, work

I then ran these words on my collection of lyrics from Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2016) to determine the songs that most frequently implemented words on the word list above. Because individual words such as love or work can appear quite frequently in a single song, and thus skew the results, I instead focused on songs that used the greatest variety of words on the list. It was not uncommon for songs to contain five of the words on the list; however, only a handful of songs had more than that. Among these, "Don't Cha", "Drops of Jupiter", "I'm Real", "The Crossroads", and "U Got It Bad" had six words each, and "Can't Hold Us" had seven. However, it was -- interestingly enough -- a song written by the British songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin that had the most words from the list (n=8) in their 1975 song Philadelphia Freedom:

If you're interested in doing a word search based on the King documents, click here. Password: mlk

As always, thanks to Clayton Darwin, Betsy Barry, and KwicKwic tools.

Donate