Sunday Morning has put 250 Essential Songs online as a Sunday Morning American Songbook, a curated set meant to answer a big American question through music. At the center of it is Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, which Nate Sloan called the number one song on the list and described as a powerful homage to the country.
The timing matters because the project is framed as a way to think about America now, not just American music as history. Sloan said music is one way to answer what it means to be American, and he defined an American song as something communal, something people can sing along to, something that can comment on society, or simply something that has stood the test of time.
That broad test helps explain why the list stretches so widely. Sloan said the plurality of cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds in the United States is reflected in music, and the selection includes George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, described as a mix of classical and jazz, along with Respect, Strange Fruit and God Only Knows. The list also reaches across generations and styles in a way that gives the American songbook a shape without narrowing it too much.
The project’s own language carries the contradiction that makes it interesting. Sloan called This Land Is Your Land deeply inclusive, saying it is not overly nationalistic and that it is a message everyone can relate to, but he also said the list is like the wild, wild west of music, where anything goes. That is the strain inside any canon built from a country as varied as the United States: it tries to define the nation while admitting the nation does not sound like just one thing.
Jon Batiste played Georgia On My Mind for the program, and Sara Bareilles performed (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, adding a live layer to a list already designed to feel shared rather than sealed off. Sunday Morning’s 250 Essential Songs are available online, and the clearest unanswered question is not whether the list is ambitious. It is how such a broad canon was chosen in the first place, when the point of the project is that America’s soundtrack was never going to fit inside a single rule.
