Boston musicians were asked to name the song that best reflects the American Songbook. Peter Wolf chose Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, then widened the frame with A Change Is Gonna Come and People Get Ready. The result is less a patriotic playlist than a map of how Greater Boston artists hear America.
Wolf’s case for Ode to Joy was explicit: Beethoven sets Schiller’s poem at the finale of what Wolf called his gigantic last symphony, then turns it into a plea for unity, “freedom,” and the hope that all humankind can come together. That makes his selection a useful starting point for this roundup, because the American Songbook here is not treated as a fixed canon but as an argument about what the United States sounds like.
Peter Wolf and the American Songbook
Wolf’s three choices pull in three directions at once. Ode to Joy reaches for universal unity; A Change Is Gonna Come points toward change under pressure; People Get Ready carries the promise of movement and access. Put together, they show how one musician can hear the American experience as aspiration rather than slogan.
The strongest part of Wolf’s explanation is its scale. By placing Beethoven beside Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, he treats American identity as something musicians borrow from, argue with, and expand. That is the useful business of a Songbook list like this one: it shows which songs still do interpretive work, not just which ones get repeated.
Boston, Greater Boston, and the range
An array of the most prominent musicians in Greater Boston picked songs they think reflect the American experience, and the list spans more than one tradition. Lift Every Voice and Sing is presented as a bellowing call for justice that keeps getting revisited because it captures the Black American experience, while What’s Going On is framed as a 1971 look at a planet in crisis and at people who put personal capital gains ahead of others’ well-being.
Other choices widen the geography of feeling. McLean’s music is described as mixing folk and rock 'n' roll, nostalgia and melancholy, and dense, cryptic lyrical themes to tell of a lost American innocence and the darkening of 1960s society. Russell’s work, by contrast, reflects cultural exchange and migration; he was a Panamanian immigrant who became a leading jazz musician in the United States, and the lyrics “We may not know which way to go on this dark road” and “in my head too much” hit home because they capture self-doubt, mental health, resilience, and the tug of war between big ideas and everyday life.
Forty Years Later, Born in the U. S.A.
Born in the U. S.A. still lands as a jingoist anthem forty years later, which is exactly the complication this roundup makes room for. Songs about America are not stable objects; they change shape depending on who is listening, and the same track can be heard as celebration, critique, or both at once.
That is why the line “All come to look for America” from Simon and Garfunkel’s America keeps returning, and why one song here reads as a torrent of vivid images of American outlaws living in transit and vulnerability while still carrying freedom, solidarity, and joy. The point of the roundup is not to settle the American Songbook into a neat list. It is to show that the country’s songs still function as a Rorschach test, and Boston musicians are using them to say so plainly.
The unanswered part is practical: which specific song did each of the other Boston musicians choose? Until that full list is laid out, Wolf’s selections do the heavy lifting, and they make a strong case that the American Songbook is best read as a contest over meaning, not a museum label.
