50 Songs For 50 States

On this three-guitar haymaker of an anthem, Muscle Shoals native Patterson Hood sings about growing up doing “crazy stupid shit” in high school, and seeing just about every big Seventies rock band that comes through the state — except Lynyrd Skynyrd, whose plane goes down right before he gets the chance. It’s the centerpiece of the Truckers’ excellent 2001 album, Southern Rock Opera. If you’ve ever been pulled over in Rogersville, Alabama, with a half ounce of weed and a case of Sterling big mouths, this one’s for you.

Honorable mention: Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Sweet Home Alabama”

Inspired by a summer hiking trip in Alaska, singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers channeled the incredible natural beauty she witnessed — “icy streams that took my breath away” — into a lovely pop song about using the expanse around her to transcend the burden of a failed relationship. “Alaska” caught the ear of super-producer Pharrell Williams when he visited a music class Rogers was taking at NYU, and the song became a viral hit. She nailed the essence of the state so well that Alaska’s most famous songwriter, Jewel, covered “Alaska” in 2022.

Honorable mention: Jewel, “Alaska”

With the help of a vocoder hook from veteran funkmaster Roger Troutman of Zapp, Tupac and Dre spread love from San Diego to the Bay. Having recently been released from prison, Pac wanted his debut single for Death Row to be as splashy as possible, and he came through with a Number One hit in the summer of 1996. “California Love” gets props for being more pan-Californian than any other California anthem — shouting out Oaktown and Compton and Inglewood (where they’re up to no good). They even have something nice to say about Sacramento, the boring state capital. Now that’s love.
Honorable mention: Joni Mitchell, “California”

Ohio native Joe Walsh was living in Boulder, Colorado, during the early 1970s and apparently psyched as hell about it — at least if you go by this talk-box-heavy 1973 banger, which he laid down at the local Caribou Ranch recording studio. He was inspired by looking up from mowing his lawn one summer day and seeing the snowcapped Rockies. “And it knocked me back because it was just beautiful,” he later recalled.
Honorable mention: Warren Zevon, “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead”

Power-pop heroes Fountains of Wayne are mainly associated with New Jersey, but they really rep the culture of the whole tristate area. On “Laser Show,” from 1999’s Utopia Parkway, they sing about kids from Bridgeport, Westport, and Darien heading down to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to space out to Pink Floyd and Metallica, then getting back on the Long Island Expressway to get home to the cozy safety of the Nutmeg suburbs.
Honorable mention: Carly Simon, “The Wives Are in Connecticut”

The idea to mention Winslow, Arizona, in the song that eventually became the Eagles’ debut single occurred to the song’s co-author Jackson Browne when his car broke down driving through Arizona in 1970. His buddy Glenn Frey came up with the line “It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me.” Today, you can visit Standin’ on the Corner Park in Winslow, featuring a flatbed red Ford and a statue of a guy holding a guitar.

Honorable mention: Meat Puppets, “Up on the Sun”

Johnny Cash was raised in Dyess, Arkansas, a resettlement community set up as part of FDR’s New Deal to aid poor farmers. Written by his Sun Records buddy Carl Perkins, this 1968 classic is one of the Man in Black’s most beloved songs, an ode to growing up in Arkansas and how it’s not so bad being poor because you’ve got family and faith and music all around — and how we’ll all be joined together again with Daddy on bass and Mama on tenor.

Honorable mention: Big Bill Broonzy, “Going Back to Arkansas”

A proud son of Wilmington, George Thorogood moved out to the West Coast in the early 1970s but returned home to form the Delaware Destroyers. They made their self-titled debut on Rounder Records in 1977, and closed it out with “Delaware Slide,” a nearly eight-minute blues boogie showcase for Thorogood’s searing slide-guitar skills. The Delaware Destroyers is also the name of a semipro baseball team ­— Thorogood played second base in his younger days, with Destroyers drummer Jeff Simon in center field.
Honorable mention: Drop Nineteens, “Delaware”

Tom Petty is the greatest musician ever to come out of Florida, and he’s referenced the Sunshine State in songs like “Gainesville” and “Southern Accents.” His greatest hit, “American Girl,” shouts out U.S. Highway 441, which runs through Petty’s hometown of Gainesville. For years it was rumored that the girl in the song was inspired by a University of Florida student who died by throwing herself out of her dorm room onto the highway, but that’s totally untrue. “The girl was looking for the strength to move on,” Petty said, “and she found it.”
Honorable mention: Rick Ross, “Hustlin’”

OutKast shifted hip-hop’s focus from the coasts to the Dirty South in the mid-Nineties with a sound steeped in their red-clay roots. “The Atlanta pride was there, because we believed it,” André 3000 later said of the Southernplayalistic sound they perfected on “ATLiens,” a silky smooth and deeply funky statement of pride in their home turf that put Georgia on the mind of every rap fan in the world. Honorable mention: Ray Charles, “Georgia on My Mind”

A beloved figure in the history of Hawaiian music and a proud advocate for Hawaiian rights, singer and ukulele player Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo‘ole found international success with this beautiful, smilingly sung medley of Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” — which he knocked out fooling around at the end of a 1988 recording session. The song was a global hit at the time, and it’s been a soundtrack staple for years.
Honorable mention: Bad Bunny, “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii”

Usually musicians from smaller states tend to decamp to the nearest hip large city — in the case of Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch, that would’ve been Seattle or Portland, Oregon. But the Twin Falls native has stayed in Idaho for most of his adult life, recording nine albums of indie-rock guitar epics. This bittersweet ode to his hometown is a highlight of BTS’ 1994 classic, There’s Nothing Wrong With Love. Honorable mention: Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Him or Me ­— What’s It Gonna Be?”

In 2005, folk artist Sufjan Stevens released Illinois, a double album in which the Land of Lincoln becomes the backdrop for a meditation on human frailty, American history, hope, faith, devotion, and loss. It peaks with “Chicago,” a sweeping song about found freedom and lost innocence on a coming-of-age road trip. Stevens’ ability to evoke the hulking expanse of Chicago is up there with the novels of Theodore Dreiser and Saul Bellow.
Honorable mention: Cheap Trick, “Surrender”

The Jackson family lived on 2300 Jackson St. in Gary, Indiana, before the Jackson 5 made the leap to Motown and took over the world. “Goin’ Back to Indiana” kicks off Side Two of the Jackson 5’s 1970 LP Third Album with a high-energy blast of nostalgia driven by Michael’s ebullient lead vocal. The following year, the Jacksons would return home to play Gary’s West Side High School for a TV concert special, also titled Goin’ Back to Indiana.
Honorable mention: John Cougar Mellencamp, “Small Town”

The nine masked nu-metal evildoers in Slipknot got together in Des Moines in the mid-Nineties. The local chamber of commerce isn’t likely to put the psycho-sludge title cut from the band’s 2001 album, Iowa, on any local tourism ads, but visitors to the city can check out the Slaughterhouse, a haunted house inspired by the band.
Honorable mention: Tom T. Hall, “It Sure Can Get Cold in Des Moines”

Wichita’s the Embarrassment were one of the great Midwestern punk bands, forming in 1979 with a killer psychedelic garage sound and self-deprecating nard-chic look years ahead of its time. “Two-Week Vacation” is about a dude on a budget with time off from work and no idea what to do with it. They repeat “Where can I go?/What can I do?” like it’s a bored Midwestern mantra over guitars that buzz like pissed-off crickets.
Honorable mention: Kansas, “Dust in the Wind”

“I remember Daddy coming home in his hardshell cap, all you could see was the whites of his eyes,” Loretta Lynn recalled. “He’d have coal dust all over him. I learned from it.” She called on her memories of growing up one of eight kids in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky ­— her daddy working in the Van Lear coal mines at night and farming corn in the day, her mommy scrubbing clothes until her fingers bled. A Number One country hit in 1970, it might be the greatest song ever about taking pride in where you’re from.
Honorable mention: Bill Monroe, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”

New Orleans musical ambassadors the Meters based this joyous 1974 song on a chant heard at Indian parades during Mardi Gras that means “Get out of our way,” mixed in some second-line swing, and gave it a jolt of funk. It’s a highlight of their classic album Rejuvenation, co-produced by Crescent City soul architect Allen Toussaint, himself a student of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair. You can hear all of that history in the Meters’ groove.
Honorable mention: Lil Wayne, “La La La”

Over the decades, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has created a series of “Going to … ” songs, desperate escapist reveries like “Going to Scotland” and “Going to Lebanon 2.” The people in “Going to Maine” are an adulterous couple running for Maine like it’s a magical place where sins are washed and dreams reborn. For Darnielle, who grew up in California, it kind of was: “When I would think of Maine, and like the whole — just the term ‘the East Coast,’ this was like Shangri-La.”
Honorable Mention: Jackson Browne, “Nothing But Time”

This outtake from Rumours — arguably the most intense breakup song in the entire Fleetwood Mac catalog — rocketed to the top of the Fleetwood Mac canon after Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s devastating performance of the song on their 1997 reunion tour. The inspiration came to Nicks when the Mac passed through Silver Spring, Maryland, on tour in the 1970s. “It sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,” she recalled. “It’s a whole symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me.” Honorable mention: Nina Simone, “Baltimore”

Jonathan Richman sings about driving down Route 128 — America’s Technology Highway — in love with suburban trees and suburban speed and the Fifties rock & roll on his radio until he finally gives in to the magic and literally yells, “I’m in love with Massachusetts!” A student of the Velvet Underground, who transplanted their urban guitar roar to New England, Richman showed much love for his hometown on the Modern Lovers’ classic debut, from the Museum of Fine Arts to the Government Center.
Honorable mention: The Bee Gees, “Massachusetts”

Has any structure erected by human hand ever been the source of as much great music as 2648 W. Grand Blvd. in Detroit, a.k.a. Hitsville USA? Not likely. “Dancing in the Street” is the ultimate Motown anthem, a party record that doubles as a protest call to arms, co-written by Marvin Gaye, who also played drums on it, delivering one of the hottest snare-drum shots ever fired. “ ‘Dancing in the Street’ was what we did in our neighborhood,” Martha Reeves recalled years later. “What was in my spirit was our neighborhood, our next-door neighbor who would put their record players on.”
Honorable mention: Bob Seger, “Night Moves”

When Prince died in 2016, thousands of people gathered outside First Avenue, the iconic Minneapolis club where he filmed the concert scenes in his 1984 biopic, Purple Rain. They all sang “Purple Rain” together in a moving act of grief and pride. In 2025, a group of bipartisan state lawmakers proposed making it the state song, alongside Bob Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country.” It’s pretty nuts that the greatest songwriter and greatest pop artist of all time both come from the same frostbitten little state. Honorable mention: The Replacements, “Skyway”

You could make the case that every other song on this list has roots in the Delta blues that Robert Johnson perfected on the spellbinding recordings he made in 1936 and 1937. The crossroads where Johnson was alleged to have sold his soul in exchange for his musical genius is commemorated by the state of Mississippi with a famous three-guitar roadside monument outside of Clarksdale, where U.S. Highway 61 meets Highway 49.
Honorable Mention: Bob Dylan, “Mississippi”

Nelly came out of St. Louis leading a local crew of high school buddies called the St. Lunatics, and broke out with his smash hit “Country Grammar (Hot Shit).” His sound was influenced by Southern rap like OutKast, but he gave it his own welcoming, laid-back Midwestern feel and playful flavor, rolling down your street in his Range Rover and going multiplatinum with his 2000 debut, Country Grammar. Honorable mention: Wilco, “Heavy Metal Drummer”

A country classic about getting out of dirty, old smog-clogged L.A. and relocating to Montana. Hag was searching for the right place to move to in the song, and asked his old buddy and longtime tour-bus driver Dean Holloway, who suggested “somewhere in the middle of damn Montana.” Haggard loved the line and used it nearly verbatim, and it became the title track of his 1982 album, Big City, and a Number One country hit. Honorable mention: Frank Zappa and the Mothers, “Montana”

In the early 2000s, Omaha spawned one of America’s coolest new rock scenes, producing bands like Cursive, the Faint, and Bright Eyes, fronted by resident genius songwriter Conor Oberst. This intimate highlight from Bright Eyes’ 2005 album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning is just Oberst and his acoustic guitar, perfectly capturing the restless feeling of wintry Plains states isolation. Honorable mention: 311, “Down”

Bright lights, big city, baby! Never has losing at gambling sounded so awesome. Vegas was still in its Moe Green/Rat Pack era when the King cut “Viva Las Vegas” in 1964. The song and the Elvis/Ann-Margret movie it was tied to helped rebrand the city as a glamorous vacation spot for everyday Americans, where night and day were flipped and the normal rules of life didn’t apply. Sixty-two years later, the Las Vegas Golden Knights play it every time they score. 
Honorable mention: The Killers, “Sam’s Town”

Indie-rock singer-songwriter Will Sheff grew up in Meriden, New Hampshire, and formed Okkervil River in the 1990s. He returned to his roots for his seventh album, The Silver Gymnasium, a concept record about growing up in the Granite State that takes its title from Meriden’s Kimball Union Academy, the boarding school he attended. The roaring highlight “Down Down the Deep River” is a Springsteen-size coming-of-age reflection that movingly lives in the space between childhood trauma and fond memory. Honorable mention: Sonic Youth, “New Hampshire”

Around 1973, Bruce Springsteen moved out of Asbury Park to Bradley Beach, New Jersey ­— “a big move, one town down,” as he told Howard Stern — and wrote this bittersweet farewell to the gritty world down on the Shore, from the switchblade lovers to the boys in high heels to the greasers getting busted for sleeping on the beach. It’s his Jersey-est song, rough and hard-boiled but romantic and dreamlike, a Van Morrison-style epic highlighted by Danny Federici’s nostalgic accordion.
Honorable mention: Tom Waits, “Jersey Girl”

Amid the sublime desolation of his 1975 bummer masterpiece Tonight’s the Night, Neil Young sings about renting a car and driving from Albuquerque to Sante Fe, escaping the pressures of his rock-star life and letting his mind merge with the highway as the miles tack on. “I’ll find somewhere where they don’t care who I am,” he sings, with Ben Keith’s steel guitar shimmering like moonlight in the high desert. Honorable mention: Zach Bryan, “Santa Fe”

There’s a jillion great NYC songs, but Billy Joel’s is special in the way it incorporates the whole state into his imperial vision. Joel was staying upstate in a house in Highland Falls when he wrote this classic about taking the Greyhound on the Hudson River line back to his hometown after a disappointing stint in L.A. Nas and Jay-Z based killer tunes on it. But somewhat astonishingly, this year his hometown paper The New York Times left him off its list of the 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters.
Honorable mention: Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, “Empire State of Mind”

“No one really wanted to claim North Carolina,” Petey Pablo said. “I’m so Carolina.” Billing himself as “the first to put it down for North Carolina,” the Greenville rapper broke out with his shirt-twisting Tar Heel anthem in 2001. Pablo showed just how Carolina he was by shouting out no less than 21 correctional facilities from throughout his home state — from Polk to Hoke to Pasquotank. Honorable mention: James Taylor, “Carolina in My Mind”

A slow-rolling travelogue through rural North Dakota set to spaced-out Pavement-style guitar drone. The Brooklyn band was inspired by a three-day drive it took from Fargo to Seattle while on tour, and being blown away by the endless wide-open grandeur. The song shouts out grain elevators, “anti-meth murals,” and the Bismarck tractor association. As frontman Andrew Savage said of the track, “All things can be beautiful, even the banal and boring things.”
Honorable mention: Bruce Hornsby, “North Dakota Slate Roof”

Chrissie Hynde grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and went to Kent State, before heading off in the 1970s to England, where she helped start the punk movement. In the Pretenders classic “My City Was Gone,” she comes back to Ohio and finds the Rust Belt hit hard by deindustrialization — “from Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls.” But this sad story has a happy ending. Hynde moved back to Akron and has become a local business owner and civic booster.
Honorable mention: Ian Hunter, “Cleveland Rocks”

A cocky local hotshot with dreams of stardom leaves Oklahoma for L.A., only to realize that maybe life back home wasn’t so bad after all — it’s an ageless story perfectly told by country great Don Williams. Written by his guitarist Danny Flowers in a snowed-in Oklahoma hotel while on tour, “Tulsa Time” was a country Number One hit in 1978. Recalled Flowers years later, “I was thinking about my friends in Tulsa and what my experience there was like, so I just started writing this song.”
Honorable mention: Flaming Lips, “Do You Realize??”

Admittedly, Nineties low-fi folk legend Elliott Smith does not have a very sunny attitude toward Portland’s Rose Parade — a local tradition that’s taken place annually since 1907. For Smith, the event is a jumping-off point for a dissection of false ritual and unearned pomp. And it’s beautiful, one of the many reasons why Smith, who died in 2003, is the greatest songwriter Oregon has ever produced.
Honorable mention: The Shins, “New Slang”

Two dudes from New Hope, Pennsylvania, with an electric, satiric notion of pop music, Ween had a surprise MTV hit in the Nineties with “Push th’ Little Daisies.” Their 1994 LP, Chocolate and Cheese, comes up with this clever love letter to Philly — from South Street to the Liberty Bell to Boyz II Men. The title honors our nation’s founding, and Gene Ween’s falsetto vocals recall a different ’76, the golden age of Philly soul and Hall and Oates.
Honorable mention: Boyz II Men, “Motownphilly”

“Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever/Flew in all her Bitch Pack friends from the city,” Taylor Swift sings on this highlight from her 2020 masterpiece Folklore. She compares herself to Standard Oil heiress Rebekah Harkness, a controversial socialite and previous owner of Holiday House, the beachfront estate in Westerly, Rhode Island, that Swift purchased in 2013. Set to a Radiohead-tinged Aaron Dessner track, she unfolds a dazzling portrayal of class gate-crashing by the seaside.
Honorable mention: The Softies, “Holiday in Rhode Island”

As a member of the Byrds on their 1968 classic Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Gram Parsons helped invent country rock. He grew up in Florida, the heir to his family’s huge citrus fortune. On “Hickory Wind,” he’s a Southern boy longing for home, opening the song by wistfully singing, “In South Carolina, there are many tall pines/I remember the oak tree that we used to climb.” In just a couple of phrases, you feel transported right to the Piedmont.
Honorable mention: Darius Rucker, “Wagon Wheel”

This high-plains honky-tonk lament was originally written by 1970s country outlier Kinky Friedman, a song about a drifter getting restless in Rapid City, where “the mail don’t move so fast.” The lyrics shout out Al’s Oasis, a beloved highway eatery outside of Chamberlain (population: 2,473). Dwight Yoakam cut a heartfelt version for his 2003 covers album, In Others’ Words.
Honorable mention: James McMurtry, “South Dakota”

With all due respect to “Tennessee Orange” and “The Tennessee Waltz,” this eternally covered 1981 co-write from Music Row hands Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove just cuts deeper than anything else, especially in Stapleton’s 2015 rendition. Borrowing a melody from Etta James’ 1967 song “I’d Rather Go Blind,” he connects country and soul music, Nashville and Memphis, making a whole history of musical integration all his own.
Honorable mention: Osborne Brothers, “Rocky Top”

Born and raised in Houston, Beyoncé has dropped references to her love of Texas in songs throughout her career, usually via allusions to her hometown’s vibrant hip-hop traditions. “Texas Hold ’Em” was a script-flipping first taste of her country album, Cowboy Carter, a banjo-driven revelation that line-danced its way to the top of the country charts in early 2024, making her the first Black artist to have a country Number One hit.
Honorable mention: The Silver Jews, “Dallas”

This jaunty oddity from Randy Newman’s 1968 debut imagines a Senate debate some time in the Gilded Age, probably right after Utah got statehood in 1896. The chair calls on the gentleman from Kansas, who rises to speak for the farmer and the little man. Then we hear from the gentleman from Utah. “Well, we got to irrigate our deserts/We’ve got to get some things to grow,” he implores, and then he gets to the real point. “And we got to tell this country about Utah/’Cause nobody seems to know.” The Doobie Brothers and Harry Nilsson both did good covers.
Honorable mention: Imagine Dragons, “Thunder”

Written during the Covid lockdown at his parents’ house in Strafford, Vermont, Noah Kahan’s breakout hit uses the bleak, barren time between when the last leaves fall and the first snow as a moving metaphor for post-breakup loneliness. In doing so, he took “stick season,” a term pretty much only known to locals, and entered it into the pop lexicon. As he said after the song blew up, “It’s a time of transition in the weather, but also in a lot of people’s lives.”
Honorable mention: Phish, “Farmhouse”

“Virginia’s for lovers, but trust there’s hate here,” the Virginia Beach duo rap, putting their own diabolical spin on their state’s famous motto. Sure, we know there’s more to do in “that ol’ Virginny” than cook up drugs, but when Pusha T and Malice are on the mic, they make it seem like the only thing going on anywhere. Slinky and ominous, threatening yet irresistible, “Virginia” finds the state’s greatest modern musical ambassadors delivering a cold-eyed warning that’s so sleek and cool it also feels like an invitation.
Honorable mention: Lucy Dacus, “Bus Back to Richmond”

Kurt Cobain was a damaged kid with a dream from the rural logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, and this early Nirvana highlight is his most autobiographical reflection on what that was like. “Sliver” is a grunge-pop short story about a childhood memory of a weird day at grandma’s — gross  food, ice cream in front of the TV, and finally waking up in his mom’s arms. Without any angst or rage, it gets at the basic experiences that subtly warp us.
Honorable mention: Sir Mix-a-Lot, “Posse on Broadway”

No one involved with this song was from West Virginia. Its writers, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, were from Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., respectively, and John Denver was born in New Mexico. Maybe that’s part of why it’s about myth as much as memory. Even though images like “Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water” stunningly evoke a specific place, the song has become an anthem of singalong nostalgia the world over. This summer during the World Cup we’ve been reminded once again how much America loves this song.
Honorable mention: Tyler Childers, “Charleston Girl”

Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon went from crafting songs in his rural cabin to becoming an unlikely star, and he’s kept it real, living in Eau Claire, where he hosts the yearly Eaux Claires Festival. “Minnesota, WI” focuses on the experience of Hmong immigrants, refugees who began arriving in Minnesota and Wisconsin after the Vietnam War and have established strong communities in the region. “Never gonna break,” he sings in his angelic falsetto, tempering hardship with Midwestern optimism.
Honorable mention: Jerry Lee Lewis, “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)”

If you’re an American state, and Craig Finn of the Hold Steady hasn’t written a song about being fucked up in you, you’re doing it wrong. Against a rootsy backdrop that recalls Bob Dylan and the Band, he plays one of the downest and outest guys he’s ever sung about, contrasting his own decay with the beauty of Wyoming: “There’s nothing quite like a Cheyenne sunrise to make us has-beens feel too old.”
Honorable mention: Chris LeDoux, “Song of Wyoming”