Last week, I posted my work on variants of "God" and "the devil" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR). For today's post, I gathered together the variants of these words as found in LAMR and investigated their use in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). My findings are presented below.

Fig. 1: Variants of "God" and "devil" in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Interestingly, while some forms of popular music, notably rock and roll, have been derided as "devil's music," references to God in the songs far outweigh mentions of the devil. This is in part due to the great number of formulaic and/or emphatic expressions, such as "Thank God!" and "Oh God."

The time span with which variants of each appear in the collection varies as well, with variants of "devil" mainly occurring in the 1970s and '90s (plus three uses in two songs in 2011), while variants of "God" are distributed from 1955 to 2015.

Finally, only 3 of the 58 songs that have variants from either set have words for both God and the devil in them: 1972's "American Pie"; 1990's "Blaze of Glory"; and 1996's "Tha Crossroads."

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