a-prefixing in pop music (1951-2014)

In yesterday’s post, I discussed a-prefixing as a productive linguistic process used by speakers of English throughout the United States, including the Rocky Mountains. In addition to coverage of a-prefixing as it occurs in elicited or conversational speech, some sociolinguistic studies have examined its use in literature (Cooley 1997; Antieau 2001) and in country music lyrics (Wilmeth 1997). In this post, I follow this line of research by looking at the occurrence of a-prefixing in pop music, by using the KwicKwic analysis tool to analyze a collection of lyrics from the Billboard year-end Ten 10 charts covering the years 1951 to 2014.

Out of the 640 songs in the collection, 20 songs exhibit a-prefixing. These songs are (by year, then rank in the charts): The Ballad of Davy Crockett; Don’t Forbid Me; Mack the Knife; The Battle of New Orleans; Runaway; Tossin’ and Turnin’; Let Me In; Sugar Shack; Last Kiss; I Can’t Help Myself; (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction; The Letter; I’ll Never Fall in Love Again; American Woman; Bad Bad Leroy Brown; Will It Go Round in Circles; Thank God I’m a Country Boy; Baby, Baby; Nobody Knows; and Before He Cheats.

All told, there are 40 instances of a-prefixing in the collection. Of the 20 songs with a-prefixing, 12 include only a single use of an a-prefix, while the remaining 8 songs each include 2 or more uses of an a-prefix. Of these 8 songs, 6 include a-prefixed forms of only a single verb type, while the remaining 2 each include a-prefixed forms of two verb types. For instance, a-coming is the only a-prefixed verb type in "The Battle of New Orleans" (n=4) and a-going the only a-prefixed verb type in "The Letter" (n=4). On the other hand, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" includes two a-prefixed verb types: a-marching and a-singing. The following figure shows the number of occurrences by verb type across all songs that exhibit a-prefixing.

As indicated, a-going is the most common verb type, as it was used a total of eight times, despite appearing in only two songs ("The Letter"; "Will It Go Round in Circles").

However, there is another way of looking at the distribution of a-prefixed verb types and that is to see how many songs each a-prefixed verb type appears in:

When viewed this way, the most frequent verb type is a-singing ("The Ballad of Davy Crockett"; "I’ll Never Fall in Love Again"; "Baby, Baby"). Given that we are looking at lyrics, this finding is perhaps domain-specific, although it is worth noting that a-singing was used to elicit a-prefixing in the Linguistic Atlas Projects (LAP) in the eastern states (Atwood 1953).

The next figure shows the distribution of a-prefixing (both by total number of uses and total number of songs) through the years.

As the chart shows, the first appearance of a-prefixing in the collection was a song released in 1955 and the most recent in 2006. However, the distribution of a-prefixing, both by number of songs and total number of uses, leans rather heavily to early rather than later, with a cluster of occurrences in the years between 1958 and 1974. Between 1974 and 1990, there are no occurrences of a-prefixing in the songs of the collection, nor are there any between 1995 and 2006.

A-prefixing proves not only to be a more common practice in older rather than more recent pop music, but, similar to the data we looked at yesterday, it is also exploited more by males than females in the collection. In this case, the difference in production by the sexes is even more pronounced than in the LAMR data, as only 3 of the 20 songs that exhibit a-prefixing in this collection were sung by females: The Sensations' "Let Me In" (1962), Amy Grant's "Baby, Baby" (1995), and Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" (2006).

Interestingly, however, two of these songs are among the most recent contributions on our list. Further analysis of a-prefixing might show the ways in which it is being used by singers to highlight different characteristics that they want to project to their audience, e.g. folksiness, masculinity, or toughness, or to draw their audience into the narrative of the song.

A note on the data: I have mentioned in earlier posts that the lyrics in my collection were downloaded from sites in which users, presumably, upload their own transcriptions to songs. And per my earlier discussion on eggcorns in music, as well as our own experiences with mondegreens, we know these transcriptions are unlikely to be perfect. However, while I did do some cleaning up files as I downloaded them (for instance, scribes had at least three different ways of indicating a-prefixing in various songs), listening to these songs to verify that a-prefixing was indeed present showed scribes to be correct in every case, that is, they introduced no false positives to the collection. While this doesn't eliminate the possibility of there being false negatives, and we will certainly continue editing these files with an eye toward rectifying such oversights by scribes, this finding boosts our confidence in the current status of the data, and it bodes well for analysis of lyrics using this collection in the near future.

References

Antieau, Lamont. (2001). "I’m a-going to see what’s going on here”: A-prefixing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Language and Literature 10(2): 145-157.

Atwood, E. Bagby. (1953). A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Cooley, Marianne. (1997). An early representation of African-American English. In Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (eds.), Language Variety in the South Revisited, pp. 51- 58. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.

Wilmeth, Thomas. (1997). “Picture’s from life’s other side”: Southern regionalisms in Hank Williams’s Luke the Drifter recordings. In Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino (eds.), Language Variety in the South Revisited, pp. 250-255. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.