Jon Batiste performs Georgia On My Mind for CBS songbook project

Jon Batiste brought Georgia On My Mind into CBS News Sunday Morning’s Essential American Songbook, performing the Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell standard for viewers as part of the network’s 250-song project. The selection placed one of the most familiar American songs in a roster built to mark the United States’ semiquincentennial and to show how the country’s musical memory keeps getting reinterpreted.

CBS News assembled the songbook from nominations by 90 contributors, including performers, artists, writers and community leaders. The project asked notable Americans to name favorite songs by American artists, with one rule: the songs had to be written and performed by Americans. The result spans eras and genres, and Batiste’s turn on Georgia On My Mind fit that larger purpose by treating an established standard as living material rather than a relic.

The song itself carries a dense public history. Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell wrote Georgia On My Mind, and Carmichael, born Nov. 22, 1899, also authored standards including Stardust and Heart and Soul. Ray Charles’ 1960 recording became his first of three career No. 1 hits, and it later helped establish the song as Georgia’s state song, binding a popular performance to regional identity in a way few recordings ever do.

Batiste’s own résumé made him an apt interpreter for that lineage. The Recording Academy lists him as an eight-time Grammy winner with 25 nominations, and it notes that he won Best Americana Album for BIG MONEY at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards. In 2025, the GRAMMY Museum and the Ray Charles Foundation announced that he would receive the inaugural Ray Charles Architect of Sound Award at the GRAMMY Hall of Fame Gala, a formal link between Batiste and one of the defining figures in the song’s modern history.

The performance underscored why Georgia On My Mind remains shorthand for both national memory and regional belonging. Its melody still travels easily between eras, but each new reading shifts its emphasis. Batiste’s version preserved the song’s standing as a classic while placing it in the hands of an artist whose own career now sits inside the same canon he was helping to refresh.