What are America’s essential songs ahead of its 250th birthday

On its June 21, 2026 broadcast, CBS News Sunday Morning asked performers, artists, writers and community leaders which songs best stand for the United States. The answers exposed a bigger question: whose stories have been canonized, and which genres now carry the national idea.

A celebration built around a moving target

The anniversary at the center of this conversation is July 4, 2026, the semiquincentennial marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. America250, the national nonpartisan organization charged by Congress to engage every American in the commemoration, has framed the occasion as a multi-year reflection on the nation’s past, present and future. The White House has taken a similar tack through its Freedom 250 framing, casting the milestone as the most important in the country’s history.

In music, that question is especially sharp because the United States does not have one official patriotic playlist, and it has never agreed on a single set of songs that can stand in for the whole country.

The songbook is a canon, not a checklist

The Great American Songbook is a loosely defined canon of American popular songs and jazz standards, mostly from the first half of the 20th century. There is no universally agreed official list, which is exactly why it remains useful for a moment like this. Its boundaries are interpretive, not fixed, and the Great American Songbook Foundation says the genre emerged within the last hundred years, with scholars helping shape its meaning over time.

A nation as large and varied as the United States does not reveal itself through a single style. Some people hear the country in Broadway melodies and Tin Pan Alley craft, others in jazz standards, folk protest, country storytelling or the vernacular pulse of regional music scenes.

Michael Feinstein and the work of preservation

Michael Feinstein, who founded the Great American Songbook Foundation, has long treated this repertoire as more than nostalgia. His mission has been to preserve the cultural legacy of American popular music and pass that love to the next generation. Preservation is not only about protecting old recordings or restoring old arrangements. It is also about deciding which songs are kept in circulation, which performers are remembered and which stories remain available to younger listeners.

The foundation says it exists to inspire and educate by celebrating the music of the Great American Songbook.

CBS News Sunday Morning widens the frame

CBS News Sunday Morning extended the anniversary conversation beyond standards and into the wider American music story. Alongside coverage tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary lead-up, the broadcast included a separate feature on Waylon Jennings’ music legacy.

Jennings belongs to a different part of the American soundscape than the classic Songbook. His legacy points to country music, outlaw sensibilities and the storytelling tradition that helped define the working, traveling and restless side of the American myth. Bringing that legacy into the same broader anniversary moment as the Great American Songbook shows that the songs Americans choose to represent themselves are no longer confined to one lineage of standards.

A national music memory that once tilted toward a narrower set of urban, theatrical and jazz-centered voices is now under pressure to make room for the fuller range of American life.

What the essential-song question really reveals

A list of essential American songs does not simply measure popularity. It shows which traditions Americans believe can carry the weight of shared identity. It also reveals which communities have been granted permanence in the national memory and which have had to fight for recognition, from country and folk to jazz, protest music and newer hybrid forms that do not fit neatly inside old categories.

America250 and the White House have framed 2026 as a national reflection point. In music, that reflection runs through the Great American Songbook and CBS News Sunday Morning’s broader look, including Waylon Jennings’ legacy.