Does Thanksgiving Music Exist?

You can almost hear the turkeys singing

If you’re reading this from the United States, I hope you are having a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. If you are outside the U.S., I hope you take some time today to be thankful for something, even if that something is this newsletter or a good song. Speaking of songs, I want to turn our attention to a silly little debate that I’ve been having: Is there such thing as Thanksgiving music?

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Does Thanksgiving Music Exist?

By Chris Dalla Riva

Some people get together with family for Thanksgiving. Others watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. My friend? He listens to Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute epic “Alice’s Restaurant.” On the surface, this seems like a strange tradition. Why listen to a talking blues written in protest of the Vietnam War on the final Thursday of November? Well, Guthrie’s ridiculously-long piece of satire partially takes place on Thanksgiving Day.

For the record, my friend isn’t the only one who celebrates this tradition. Many classic rock stations will play the song at some point on Thanksgiving. Some even play it for hours on end. A popular holiday where everyone is busy might be the only time when you can get away with something like that.

Each year when my friend inevitably texts me that he’s about to give “Alice’s Restaurant” a spin, I briefly wonder if there are any other Thanksgiving classics. This thought is usually short-lived. My mind is quickly consumed by an onslaught of food and wine. But this year, I decided to be proactive and determine if there is a true Thanksgiving musical canon.

To do this, I scraped 31,000 songs from over 400 playlists on Spotify with “Thanksgiving” in the title. After aggregating the data, here were the most popular songs for the holiday.