Here, I take a look at references to American states in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). As a first attempt at investigating this theme in popular music, I looked only for references to the full official name of the state and not at nicknames, such as "Sunshine State" or "Land of 10,000 lakes," or shortenings, such as "F.L.A." or "Cal." Furthermore, I made every effort to distinguish between the use of these names for states and physical or cultural artifacts associated with those states (e.g. "Tennessee Waltz") and when the names were being used for other things (e.g. "Mississippi River" or "Tony Montana"). This proved to be difficult in some cases, in particular, in deciding when "New York" was referring to the state or the city. In cases in which it was unclear, I tended to deal with the reference rather than to omit it from the study. The results are presented in the table below:

Fig. 1. References to states in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the states receiving the greatest amount of attention in popular music (namely, California, New York, and Texas) draw from the most populous states of the Union. In fact, among the three most populated states of the U.S. only Florida is not mentioned in this collection; however, the state has only recently reached this ranking in the U.S. Census, so time (or the use of abbreviations and nicknames, from a methodological perspective) might rectify this lack.

Here are videos of songs featuring the names of states. I have featured only one song for each of the states, with the final song comprising three state names. I also have intentionally tried to post songs not normally associated with the states (such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas"); however, in some cases this was unavoidable. If you'd like a full list of the songs that played a role in this analysis, please contact me.

California:

Texas:

Georgia:

Tennessee:

West Virginia:

Mississippi:

And, finally, New York, Virginia, and Delaware:

This is only the first of what I hope will be many forays into how place names are used in popular music, so stay tuned for more.

Also, if you'd like to do a word search puzzle on the state names used in this post, click here.

Donate