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The Most Popular Words In Country Songs: 2013

November 23, 2013 by Dayne Shuda 2 Comments

It’s time for something fun.

I thought it would be interesting to see what words were the most popular in country songs from the last year.

Here’s the criteria:

1. I used the number one songs on both the Billboard Hot Country Songs and the Billboard Country Airplay Songs.

2. Each number one was only counted once.

3. The top 50 words are listed.

There are a few different ways you could do this. You could wait for the year end chart and use the top 20 songs or something. Since some big songs from the last year didn’t reach the number one spot.

You could also give songs more weight the longer they were at number one. That would kind of even out if you did the year end chart thing.

But this is how we’re going to do it. I think it will still bring out some fun findings.

Here is the word cloud:

Country Music Word Cloud 2013

[click to enlarge]

Pretty interesting right?

I don’t know if it’s surprising that “baby” is the most common word in country music in 2013.

“Wanna” is kind of a surprise.

“Girl” make sense. Men kind of dominated the charts this year over the women.

You know “momma” is always going to be a popular topic in country music.

“Cruise” didn’t make the list. Kind of surprising. It was probably the word used the most since that song dominated the charts this year.

I’m not sure how I feel about “rock” being mentioned nearly twice as much as “country”. Maybe that speaks to what is going on in country right now.

I’m going to have to go back and look at some past decades to see how this has changed over time.

My guess would be that “baby” was always around, but maybe not as popular as “woman”, “her” and a few others like that. But maybe I’m wrong.

A lot of words are filler. You have your “gonna”, “wanna” and “yeah”.

I would have thought that “country” and “truck” would have been higher on the list. Maybe even “KC Lights” this year. Those seemed to be popular in 2013.

What are your thoughts?

Any surprises?

Anything missing?

Dayne Shuda

Founder of Country Music Life. Follow on Twitter: @dayneshuda Follow on Google+: Dayne Shuda

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Comments

  1. Elwood says

    November 23, 2013 at 7:49 pm

    thanks for the lyric info, I write songs and that is good to know

  2. Brody McCain says

    February 17, 2017 at 10:09 am

    Yep we’ve come a far cry from trains, guns, prisons and cheatin’

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