Following up on last week's discussions of variants of "God" and "the devil" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, and this past Thursday's discussion of variants of both in Top Ten music, this post looks at uses of heaven and hell in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016).

Both heaven and hell (and words that take the former as a stem) are used modestly in the 660-song collection, as illustrated in the figure below:

In line with my earlier study of "God" and "devil" in pop lyrics, heaven outperforms hell in the collection, with nearly twice as many songs featuring the former than the latter, and the former having almost double the total number of instances of the latter as well. It should be noted that variant terms for these concepts, namely pearly gates and Hades, were not found in the collection; underworld appeared once, but in reference to the world of espionage (in Carly Simon's "You're So Vain").

The chronological distribution of variants of heaven as well as hell are provided in the figures below:

As illustrated, heaven variants have appeared in Top Ten music in each of the decades covered by my Top Ten collection, while hell is absent in three of those decades. Use of heaven appears to peak (by song and instance) in the 1990s, while hell appears to peak in the 2000s. Perhaps more importantly, hell does not appear in the 1950s and '60s, perhaps because the word was considered taboo or the concept was not one of concern during that time period, but outperforms heaven during the last two decades, as the use of heaven wanes.

Finally, in contrast to the distribution of "God" and "devil" in pop music (as presented in my earlier post), no songs in the Top Ten collection included both terms investigated here, :