- Person
- Bob Dylan
- Lived
- b. 1941
- Field
- Music
- From
- American
The story
In the mid-1980s many American family farmers were in danger of losing their farms through mortgage debt. At the same time the world's attention was on the famine in Ethiopia, and on 13 July 1985 the Live Aid benefit concerts raised money for famine relief before a worldwide audience estimated at more than a billion people.
Bob Dylan appeared at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, backed by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones. He performed Ballad of Hollis Brown, his early song about rural poverty, and then told the worldwide audience he hoped a little of the money, perhaps a million or two, might be used to help American farmers pay the mortgages they owed to banks.
Many people at the time thought the remark was out of place at a concert for famine victims, and it was widely criticised. But it struck a chord with Willie Nelson, who joined with John Mellencamp and Neil Young to organise a benefit for debt-ridden American farmers. The first Farm Aid concert was held just ten weeks later, on 22 September 1985, at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. Before a crowd of 80,000, performers including Dylan himself, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty raised more than 9 million dollars.
The founders had hoped one concert might solve the problem, but the crisis proved far deeper, so Farm Aid became an annual event and a permanent organisation. Nelson and Mellencamp brought farmers to testify before Congress, which passed the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987 to help save family farms from foreclosure. Farm Aid also runs a hotline offering farmers advice and a disaster fund that has helped those hit by floods and hurricanes.
That same busy year Dylan also sang on the USA for Africa famine relief single We Are the World and on Sun City, the anti-apartheid song by Artists United Against Apartheid.
Why it matters
A few unscripted words from Dylan helped launch Farm Aid, which has supported struggling American family farmers for four decades.
About Bob Dylan
Singer-songwriter; Nobel laureate in Literature for transforming American song.
More about Bob Dylan
- Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind became a civil rights anthemBob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind, released in 1963, asked whether war and injustice would ever end, and with The Times They Are a-Changin' became an anthem of the civil rights movement.
- Bob Dylan campaigned for Rubin Hurricane Carter in songIn 1975 Bob Dylan released Hurricane, an eight-minute ballad arguing that the imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter was innocent, and performed it at every date of his Rolling Thunder tour.
- Bob Dylan sang at the 1963 March on WashingtonOn 28 August 1963 Bob Dylan sang at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech.
- Bob Dylan wrote songs about victims of racial injusticeIn 1963 and 1964 Bob Dylan wrote songs about the murder of Medgar Evers, the death of barmaid Hattie Carroll and James Meredith's ordeal integrating the University of Mississippi.
- Bob Dylan gave his Christmas album royalties to fight hungerBob Dylan donated all his royalties from his 2009 album Christmas in the Heart to Feeding America, the UK charity Crisis and the World Food Programme.
- Bob Dylan joined the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971On 1 August 1971 Bob Dylan made a surprise appearance at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, the first major rock benefit concert, raising help for refugees.
- Bob Dylan's archive became a public centre in TulsaAbout 6,000 of Bob Dylan's notebooks, lyric drafts, recordings and letters were acquired for Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Bob Dylan Center opened to the public on 10 May 2022.
Sources
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.