Songs with the name Billy

The name Billy has wandered through pop music in some strikingly different guises. Mika's Billy Brown (2007) is a bouncy, glam-flavoured pop single about a married man who leaves his wife for another man, wrapped in a chorus so cheerful the story almost slips by unnoticed. Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods took Billy Don't Be a Hero to the top of the charts in 1974 with a bright, marching pop sound that sits oddly against its Civil War story of a soldier who never comes home. Bruce Springsteen's Wild Billy's Circus Story, from his 1973 debut, is an acoustic, harmonica-laced vignette of small-town carnival characters in his early Dylan-influenced style.

Bob Dylan recorded a song simply called Billy for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in 1973 — a spare, dusty-sounding fragment that fits the film's outlaw atmosphere. Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid, from 1938, belongs to another world altogether: a ballet score full of open-prairie harmonies and cowboy tunes, including a famous quiet treatment of the song Git Along, Little Dogies. Billy Joel's The Ballad of Billy the Kid, also from 1973, is a big, orchestrated Western epic from his early piano-man era, full of dramatic storytelling and swagger.

The quieter entries are worth seeking out too. Neal McCoy's Billy Got His Beer Goggles On (2005) is a tongue-in-cheek country number about drowning heartbreak at the bar, while Steve Earle's Billy Austin (1995) is a stark, mournful ballad about a condemned man facing execution — one of the most sombre songs the name has ever carried.