How to calculate the counts of each distinct value in a pyspark dataframe?

I think you're looking to use the DataFrame idiom of groupBy and count.

For example, given the following dataframe, one state per row:

df = sqlContext.createDataFrame([('TX',), ('NJ',), ('TX',), ('CA',), ('NJ',)], ('state',))
df.show()
+-----+
|state|
+-----+
|   TX|
|   NJ|
|   TX|
|   CA|
|   NJ|
+-----+

The following yields:

df.groupBy('state').count().show()
+-----+-----+
|state|count|
+-----+-----+
|   TX|    2|
|   NJ|    2|
|   CA|    1|
+-----+-----+