It all began with the Bismarck—specifically the sinking thereof. While cruising one morning in the music land that is Spotify, we found ourselves listening to Johnny Horton’s 1960 warhorse Sink the Bismarck and were surprised to remember that Churchill makes a cameo appearance at the half-way point of the song. This accidental discovery led to what at the time seemed to be two simple questions, “How many other popular songs mention Churchill?” and “Do these songs paint Churchill in a positive light, or is he remembered for his all-too-human imperfections?” For researchers, however, there are no such things as simple questions (particularly when you know virtually nothing about the subject), as we were soon to learn on our path down the complex rabbit hole of “WSC in dancing shoes.”
Methodology
The search began with the query, “all songs with Winston Churchill in the lyrics” producing a list of eighty-seven (and about a million non-existing songs proffered up by ChatGPT). We decided to limit our search to songs written after Sink the Bismarck in order to avoid wartime anthems, which we felt would be a different study. Each song, performer, and mention of Churchill was cross-checked with various lyric websites and/or with Spotify. Analysis was conducted on the twenty-two songs meeting the following criteria:
• the name “Winston Churchill” or “Churchill” was directly in the lyrics (there were several songs that included quotes from Sir Winston, or even his voice, but these were studies for another day)• the song lyrics could be found on more than one website• the lyrics were in English
See the table accompanying this article for the full list of the songs we found, along with
