(Roughly) Daily

I’ve started working on a textual analysis of popular country music.

More specifically, I scraped Ranker.com for a list of the top female and male country artists of the last 100 years and used my python wrapper for the Genius API to download the lyrics to each song by every artist on the list. After my script ran for about six hours I was left with the lyrics to 12,446 songs by 83 artists stored in a 105 MB JSON file. As a bit of an outsider to the world of country music, I was curious whether some of the preconceived notions I had about the genre were true.

Some pertinent questions:

Which artist mentions trucks in their songs most often?

Does an artist’s affinity for trucks predict any other features? Their gender for example? Or their favorite drink?

How has the genre’s vocabulary changed over time?

Of all the artists, whose language is most diverse? Whose is most repetitive?…

John W. Miller dives deeply into Country lyrics: “Trucks and Beer.”

* Willie Nelson

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As we parse the pain, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that Loretta Lynn’s epic “Coal Miner’s Daughter” hit #1 on the Billboard Country chart.  It mentions neither truck nor beer.