America Sings
— — the eagle, the owl, and a country singing to itself.
Not only on a wall.
“An audio-animatronic revue that ran in Disneyland's Tomorrowland from 1974 to 1988. Sam the Eagle and Ollie the Owl walked the audience through two centuries of American song: frontier ballads, river-boat tunes, gospel, ragtime, the swing era, the rock and roll years. The Carousel Theater rotated through six scenes and closed in the present. The room is quiet now. The music kept walking.
America Sings, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
America Sings opened on June 29, 1974 in the Carousel Theater in Disneyland's Tomorrowland, a rotating-audience building inherited from the General Electric Carousel of Progress, which had moved to Walt Disney World in 1973. The attraction was designed by Marc Davis, one of Walt Disney's original Nine Old Men, and featured roughly 114 audio-animatronic characters across six rotating scenes. It ran for almost fourteen years and closed on April 10, 1988. Many of its animal figures were later rebuilt into Splash Mountain, which opened on the south end of the park in 1989.
The show celebrated 1776 to the then-present (1974) through American folk and popular song. The first scene opened on the frontier with 'Yankee Doodle' and 'Pop! Goes the Weasel,' moved to a riverboat for 'Down by the Riverside,' visited a gospel saloon, swung through the 1920s and the big-band years, and closed on a contemporary rock and roll finale with the eagle and the owl front and centre. The Sherman Brothers wrote the title song, and the score drew on more than thirty traditional American tunes recognisable to most audiences of the day.
The Carousel Theater building still stands in Tomorrowland, just past the Astro Orbitor. After America Sings closed in 1988 the building sat largely unused for nearly a decade before reopening as Innoventions in 1998, then later as Star Wars Launch Bay and various Marvel character experiences. The original geese, vultures, frogs, and other animal figures were rebuilt into the cast of Splash Mountain, which opened in 1989 and reopened as Tiana's Bayou Adventure in 2024. The eagle and owl themselves remain in archive storage at Walt Disney Imagineering.