Highly legible cultural artifacts of the US (food, music, literature etc. as opposed to worldview and religion, where no one really denies that the US has a separate outlook from anywhere else -- but it should always be remembered that 'culture' is *not* just highly legible cultural artifacts, but rather an entire set of norms, outlooks, taboos, practices, affiliations, oppositions, etc.; I would say 'worldview' but I'm not sure that goes deep enough) that aren't part of consumer culture:

Music
=====

Characteristic musical instruments:
* banjo (Appalachia)
* mountain dulcimer (Appalachia)
* electric guitar (everywhere, but everyone picked it up)
Rare but characteristic:
* dobro
* sousaphone
* glass armonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin and popular for a time in European courts, even played by Marie Antoinette, but disappeared because it was expensive, made of glass (subject to breakage), and (most importantly?) not loud enough for concert halls)

Folk traditions: (defining 'consumer culture' as 'pieces of music are associated with their original writer/performer, who is always known')
* Appalachian folk
* blues
* jazz
There are others, but they're less generally known and more strongly regional: zydeco in Louisiana, Germanic/Slavic folk music in the Midwest and Inland North, Sacred Harp, etc.

Composers:
* John Philip Sousa
* George Gershwin
* Scott Joplin
* Aaron Copland
* Harry Partch
* John Cage
* Lou Harrison
* Steve Reich
* Philip Glass
* John Adams (not the president!)
* John Williams
also some generally forgotten pre-20th c. composers (there were two separate New England schools!)
* Anthony Philip Heinrich
* Daniel Read
* William Billings
etc.
and Dvořák wrote some music about America

Literature
==========

We don't have a national epic -- there were a few attempts (Columbiad, The Song of Hiawatha) but they're not very good. This is in contrast to most European countries (Don Quixote, Kalevala, Kalevipoeg, the Nibelungenlied, the Song of Roland, the Poetic Edda, etc.) but in common with Britain -- though Britain has a few contenders (Beowulf, Historia Regum Britanniae, Paradise Lost apparently) and then a national writer (Shakespeare) who has nothing to do with the epics. America is probably too big to have even a 'Great American Novel'.

The canon:
* To Kill a Mockingbird
* A Separate Peace (unfortunately)
* The Great Gatsby
* Moby Dick
* Tom Sawyer
* Huckleberry Finn
* Gone with the Wind
* Gravity's Rainbow
* Infinite Jest
* House of Leaves?

Then:
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Henry David Thoreau
* Washington Irving (the Rip Van Winkle guy)
* Ernest Hemingway
* the Fireside Poets
* Tom Wolfe
* Allen Ginsberg
* H.L. Mencken
* Edgar Allan Poe
* Saul Bellow
* William Faulkner
* Ezra Pound
etc.

Folklore
========

* Paul Bunyan (yeah yeah "fakelore" who cares)
* Brer Rabbit
* Casey at the Bat
* Ichabod Crane
* Rip van Winkle
* Uncle Sam
* Santa Claus (technically pan-Germanic, isn't it? then again, so is the mountain dulcimer)
* chupacabra
* jackalope
* Bigfoot/Sasquatch
* as edge cases for commercial vs. noncommercial, Bugs Bunny and Calvin
* the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Protestants make a big deal out of the Old Testament.
* the exodus of the Mormons (yeah yeah "historical" who cares)
* the Pilgrims and the Puritans
* something to do with Oklahoma?
* the California gold rush
* the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl
* Theodore Roosevelt is a major folkloric figure and I will fight anyone who disagrees
* so is Nixon
* some people think Reagan is so he has to be included for completeness, but let's be serious here, fuck that
* the Founding
* Eternal General of the Armies, George Washington
* Reagan for some reason???
There are obviously more, but this is supposed to be a short list. There are also regional figures -- around where I'm from, the local cryptid is, I shit you not, the Goatman.

Folktales of a particular sort:
* Billy the Kid
* Buffalo Bill
* Bonnie and Clyde
* Ted Bundy
* Ed Gein
* the lynching of Emmett Till
* Charles Manson
* Jim Jones
* Heaven's Gate
* the shootout at the OK Corral
* the assassination of Lincoln
* the assassination of JFK
* there's a folk song about the assassination of McKinley (White House Blues) but I don't think it really counts here

Art
===

I've got nothing. Abstract expressionism is the official style of the country -- just go into any government building or walk around any city. There's Frank Lloyd Wright, I guess.

I assume there was an entire world of people who got memory-holed in the same way as all the composers before Sousa.

Other
=====

* Protestantism, esp. of the evangelical variety (which gets wrapped up with all sorts of other American stuff when it gets exported, check these out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYSQSL5VAP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDDmagjWRE)
* something about revival tents?
* voting + political participation as ~religious rituals (again, frequently exported)
* American folk religion ("New Thought"/"New Age". some of this stuff came from the Germans -- Steve Sailer has written about that somewhere)
* Thanksgiving, Easter, and an assortment of product-placement holidays
* Baseball
* Football

I would add food and drink categories, but those are 1) inherently commercial 2) too regional to be informative, so all I will say is that a proper pizza is square.

In closing, here is an absolutely essential piece of Americana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMO5DfRIv-k