Zac Brown Band performs Free as America marks 250th birthday

CBS posted a clip of Zac Brown Band performing Free on July 9, extending a performance that aired inside a prime-time production built to frame America’s 250th birthday as a national television event. The song landed inside a show that paired patriotic pageantry with a broad, cross-genre lineup and a live setting at one of the country’s most recognizable monuments.

The Great American Block Party 250 ran Saturday, July 4, from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. ET on CBS and streamed on Paramount+ and CBS News 24/7. Tony Dokoupil, the CBS Evening News anchor, and Nischelle Turner, co-host of Entertainment Tonight, hosted live from the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., turning the capital into the broadcast’s visual center.

CBS billed the special as part of the semiquincentennial celebration and said it featured exclusive performances by Zac Brown Band, Jon Batiste, Goo Goo Dolls and The War and Treaty. Queen Latifah, The Roots and Jill Scott were later added to the lineup, widening the event’s musical range and pushing the production beyond a single sound or region. Free fit that strategy neatly: a song with a title that reads as a declaration, placed inside a show designed to sell the birthday of the United States to a mass audience.

America250, the congressionally charged nonpartisan organization leading the 250th-anniversary commemoration, expanded America’s Block Party to seven host locations and more than 1,200 grassroots celebrations nationwide over July 3 and 4. The group said all 350 million Americans were invited to take part, and it launched a Giving 4th initiative to encourage Americans to give back to their communities during the holiday period.

CBS and America250 also built the broadcast toward what they described as the largest fireworks display ever, including a record-setting spectacle over Washington, D.C. The result was less a single concert clip than a televised exercise in national branding, with live music, civic symbolism and a monumental backdrop all pulled into the same patriotic frame.