46th Annual A Capitol Fourth Concert (Capital Concerts, Inc., PBS, aired July 4, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 4) I watched the 46th annual A Capitol Fourth on PBS, as I usually do every year on the Fourth of July. The show was hosted by Alfonso Ribero, who despite his Latino-sounding name presents as African-American, and it featured some quite interesting performers even though the talent list wasn’t as overwhelming as it’s been in previous years (which featured at least the current rump versions of The Beach Boys and The Temptations). It began with country singer Trace Adkins (son of Rhett Adkins, whose CD I once bought at the Auntie Helen’s thrift store because I liked his basket on the cover) doing a new song called “American Made,” though when Ribero announced it I thought at first the title was “American Maid.” Then country singer Carly Pearce came on to do “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven” (the basic melody had been written by British composer John Stafford Smith in the 1770’s for an Oxford University student drinking club called The Anacreontic Society), and did a quite credible job on this insanely difficult melody which you almost have to be drunk to sing decently. (She certainly did a better job than Alexis Wilkins, girlfriend of current FBI director Kash Patel, had at one of President Trump’s celebrations of the official 250th anniversary of American independence.) Afterwards came an interminable medley of hit songs from one of the most annoying bands of all time, Kool and the Gang, a key group in the 1970’s transformation of righteous soul music into disco. They did fragments of songs about “getting down” and “boogieing,” including bits of their two greatest hits (or at least the two songs of theirs I found at least tolerable “in the day”), “Oh, What a Night” and “Celebrate (Good Times).” The next number was another medley, this time of Bobby Darin’s songs from the bio-musical about him, Just in Time: “Beyond the Sea” (which French singer Charles Trenet wrote as a heartfelt, haunting ballad and Darin sped up into a tasteless Vegas lounge song), “Mack the Knife” (which Darin copied from Louis Armstrong’s recording, down to name-checking “Lotte Lenya,” wife of the song’s composer, Kurt Weill), “Dream Lover,” and “Splish Splash.” It was a bit disorienting to hear Darin’s songs in reverse chronological order. Darin’s career can be divided into three periods based on who he was trying to be in each one, first Elvis Presley, then Frank Sinatra, and finally Bob Dylan. (In 1962 he jumped from Atlantic Records’ Atco subsidiary to Capitol because Frank Sinatra had just left Capitol to found his own label, Reprise; he’d took Dean Martin with him; and thus the “Italian-American Crooner” slot at Capitol was wide open and Darin, born Walden Robert Cassoto, filled it.) Hearing his songs in reverse order like this isn’t true to his real-life story. But it was still fun.

Next Gary Sinise, who usually co-hosts the annual Memorial Day Concert (actually more of a spoken-word tribute to America’s military heroes with bits of song interspersed than a real concert) with Joe Mantegna (who’s dropped out of the last two Memorial Day shows for health reasons), came on to introduce the Artemis II astronauts who’d just orbited the moon for the first time since 1972. Given that only two of the four crew members are white men – one is an African-American male and one is a white woman – they are the stuff of which Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s nightmares are made, though that didn’t stop Trump from inviting them to his own 250th anniversary celebration on the National Mall and hideously mangling his introduction of them. (Trump said “NASA” as if he’d never heard of it before.) Then the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who’s been leading this concert since its founding pops conductor, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009), played a thoroughly banal main theme from Bill Conti’s score for the movie The Right Stuff as a supposed tribute to the Artemis II astronauts. After that Patti Labelle came out to do the song “The House I Live In,” written by composer Earl Robinson and lyricist Abel Meeropol (as “Lewis Allen”) and introduced by Frank Sinatra in a 1945 short film dealing with racial prejudice. Though the song was actually first sung by a man named Mordecai Bauman in a 1942 stage revue called Let Freedom Sing, it became identified with Sinatra and he sang it for the rest of his career, even after his politics moved steadily Rightward over time. Had Patti Labelle sung it with the quiet dignity of Sinatra’s versions (especially the one in the 1945 film and the performance he gave at the inaugural gala for President John F. Kennedy in 1961), it could have been one of the high points of the program. Instead she way over-ornamented it much the way she’d done with her ghastly 1980’s cover of “Over the Rainbow,” and she gave so overwrought a performance she literally knocked over her mike stand at the end. After that Carly Pearce came back and did Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and while she stuck to the “safe” verses as usual (I know it’s too much to hope for to hear the full version of “This Land Is Your Land” with its radical message intact on this occasion) and didn’t sing it with the passion Lauren Alaina gave it in 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLAVn-sKfEY), she still did quite a good job on this much-abused song.

After that they brought on the U.S. Army Old Fife and Drum Corps for “Yankee Doodle” as an introduction to a tribute to the U.S. military, which featured active-duty servicemembers giving little statements on why they serve. It climaxed with Trace Adkins doing a quite moving song called “He’s Still a Soldier.” Then, after a performance of “This Is My Country” by the Joint Armed Forces Chorus, African-American opera star Angel Blue turned in a scorching rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” that could have given Patti Labelle lessons in just how far to ornament a song without crossing over into the bounds of tastelessness. There followed a performance of “America, the Beautiful” by country star Alan Jackson beamed in from Nashville, and though I could have done without the deliberately torn jeans he was wearing, he turned in a tasteful, understated performance that belies country music’s reputation as an emotionally overwrought genre. After that the National Symphony Orchestra played John Williams’s “Olympic Fanfare” as part of a tribute to the U.S. men’s and women’s Olympic and Paralympic successes this year. Then followed a medley of songs by the jazz-rock band Chicago, or what’s left of them given how many of the founding members, including guitarist Terry Kath and reedman Walt Parazaider, are dead. They opened their three-song medley with “Saturday in the Park,” probably because it contains the line, “Must have been the Fourth of July,” which just happened to fall on a Saturday this year. Then they played “Stronger Every Day” and “25 or 6 to 4,” and the fireworks display started during Chicago’s last song. Incidentally they were set off this year from George Washington’s old home at Mount Vernon because Donald Trump’s “Freedom 250” show pre-empted their usual staging area on the National Mall. The fireworks continued during “Let Freedom Ring” by the Joint Armed Forces Chorus and the typically truncated five-minute version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with added cannons, gunshots, and a chorus singing the Russian Tsarist national anthem whenever Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score. (The politics of playing the 1812 Overture on these occasions were weird enough during the Cold War and got even weirder now that it’s a story of an historically autocratic Russian state beating back a French government that had been founded in a revolution but had been taken over by an authoritarian.) The closing numbers were the U.S. Army Band playing a patriotic medley of “Yankee Doodle,” “The Caisson Song,” and George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”; Lauren Allred singing a quite nice version of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (ironically a song Woody Guthrie hated and wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as an answer to!); and the National Symphony wrapping things up with John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” as the closing credits came up. All in all, it was a fun show, not as exalting as this concert has been in previous years, but a far cry from the propagandistic orgy of pseudo-patriotism going on nearby at the Washington Mall featuring a typically hateful, divisive speech by Donald Trump.