Forty years ago, at the Live Aid festival in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, it took Bob Dylan just a few moments to set in motion the music industry’s longest-running concert for a cause — Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid.
Dylan took the stage at JFK Stadium late in the day, just past 10:30 p.m., accompanied by Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, each with acoustic guitars. (They were preceded by Mick Jagger and Tina Turner’s incendiary duet.)
Opening with two seldom-performed songs from 1964, “Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “When The Ship Comes In,” Dylan then said, in an off-the-cuff manner:
“I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa, maybe they can just take a little bit of it — maybe one or two million, maybe — and use it, say, to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks.”
“The question hit me like a ton of bricks,” Nelson recalled to his biographer David Ritz in Billboard in 2015. The musician was on the road that day, watching Live Aid on his tour-bus TV.
“Farming was my first job,” he told Billboard. “I picked cotton. I pulled corn. I knew firsthand what it meant to farm. I knew damn well how tough it was. My farm roots are deep-seated in the soil of my personal story.”
So are the roots of Nelson’s philanthropy. In his small hometown of Abbott, Texas, where he attended the United Methodist Church, “we had a collection box, and even though we were struggling financially, I knew there were folks with far greater struggles. As part of a loving community, I was taught the moral responsibility of helping those in need.”
Like Dylan, at that time, Nelson also had been following the news of the family farming crisis that was devastating the heartland of the United States. Prices paid for crops had plummeted. Banks were foreclosing on farms, throwing families off land they had worked, often, for generations. Small towns, dependent on spending by local farmers, were reeling.
David Senter, a fourth-generation farmer and co-founder of the American Agriculture Movement, recalled that time for “Against the Grain,” the Farm Aid podcast.
“The farm crisis was a terrible, expanding tragedy for rural America,” said Senter. “We lost 50 percent of the total family farmers during the crisis. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five farmers a day were going out of business during ’85. We brought a couple of thousand farmers to Washington in March of ’85 and we had a rally on the steps of the Jefferson [Memorial]. We had 365 white crosses [bearing the names of farmers] who had committed suicide or been foreclosed on. And we drove them on the Mall and made a graveyard in front of U.S.D.A.,” the headquarters of the United States Department of Agriculture.
In 1985, Nelson’s booking agent was Tony Conway of Buddy Lee Attractions. For a history of Farm Aid published for the organization’s 20th anniversary, Lee recalled that, in August of that year, Nelson was playing the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, Ill., when the singer said: “I want to do a concert for the American farmers. I want to see if we can do it here in Illinois, just someplace where we can get a stadium.”
“Willie asked me, ‘Do you think you can get a hold of the governor?,’” he recalled. “I made a few calls and got a call back saying [then] Governor Jim Thompson was on his way to the bus.”
Nelson told his idea to Thompson, Lee said, and the governor made a call to secure availability of the football stadium at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Ill., for the one day open in Nelson’s packed autumn touring schedule — Sept. 22, 1985.
Nelson recruited Neil Young and John Mellencamp, who later became the first fellow members of the Farm Aid board. (The board expanded in 2001 to include Dave Matthews and again in 2021 to include Margo Price — who had grown up on a farm which her family lost in 1986, during the crisis which led to the creation of Farm Aid.)
Farm Aid: A Concert for America was put together with the unthinkably short lead time of six weeks. It raised more than $7 million for the nation’s family farmers and featured performers including Billy Joel, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty — and Bob Dylan.
A front-page story in Billboard, under the bylines of Paul Grein and Kip Kirby, reported that the Jam Productions of Chicago, which help mount Farm Aid, used the same 60-foot diameter, circular, two-stage set that had been used at JFK Stadium for Live Aid.
The Billboard story reported that Nelson wrote the first check on the Farm Aid account to the National Council of Churches in the amount of $100,000 for food pantries to help feed farm families in seven states: Iowa, Minnesota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio and Kansas. “In addition,” Billboard reported, “Nelson notes that the toll-free 1-800-FARMAID phone lines will remain in operation for one year.”
Forty years later, Farm Aid carries on. The organization has raised more than $80 million to support programs that help family farmers thrive. It has earned a four-star rating from Charity Navigator, the widely known assessment organization for philanthropies.
Nelson, Young, Mellencamp, Matthew and Price will headline this year’s anniversary concert on Sept. 20 at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, on a bill with Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Trampled by Turtles, Waxahatchee, Eric Burton of Black Pumas, Jesse Welles and Madeline Edwards.
Transcending the crisis which sparked its creation, Farm Aid’s mission today is “to build a vibrant, family farm-centered system of agriculture in America,” the organization states on its website. “We’re best known for our annual music, food and farm festival, but the truth is we work each and every day, year-round to build a system of agriculture that values family farmers, good food, soil and water, and strong communities.”
And Dylan, who has been sharing headlining status with Nelson on this summer’s Outlaw Music Festival Tour, made a surprise return to the Farm Aid stage in 2023 at the Ruoff Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana.
Joined by members of The Heartbreakers — whom he first performed with at Farm Aid in 1985 — Dylan walked onstage without any introduction, and played a short-but-intense set of “Maggie’s Farm,” “Positively 4th Street” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” against the stark backdrop of a silhouetted windmill.
His connection to Nelson, to Farm Aid and the cause he first highlighted at Live Aid 40 years ago remains unbroken.
