How often is your state named in popular songs?

Does your state inspire musicians to write songs? Julia Silge, who writes a blog, data science ish, used figures from the Billboard Hot 100 from 1958 to the present to chart two maps, one that shows how many times a state was mentioned in song lyrics and one that divided mentions by population to find which states got more or less than their share of attention, Ana Swanson reports for The Washington Post. (Pictogram: Number of mentions by state)

"Southern states like Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky turned out to have an outsized influence, as did states like New York, Hawaii and Montana," Swanson writes. "Nebraska and Maine also fared well." (Number of mentions by state per every million residents)

Silge found that New York had the most mentions, 51, although she estimates that many of those references probably refer to the city, not the state. Second was California, with 26 mentions, followed by Georgia (21), Texas (13), Tennessee (11), Alabama (9), Mississippi (8), Kentucky (7) and Hawaii and Virginia (6).

When accounting for mentions per every million people, Hawaii was No. 1, followed by Mississippi, New York, Maine, Georgia, Montana, Alabama, Tennessee, Nebraska and Kentucky.