The marking of Farm Aid’s 40th anniversary has offered us many opportunities to think about the work ahead while also looking to the organization’s long history for inspiration. On the evening before the festival in Minneapolis, for example, Farm Aid Eve featured an immersive video and slideshow that highlighted the work of so many artists, farmers, organizers and advocates whose hard work has sustained the movement over all these decades. And, of course, at Farm Aid 40 itself, festivalgoers got to hear from many of our movement’s leading lights on stage and on film between sets.
Meanwhile, on the same day as Farm Aid 40, just two states away, a hard working group of curators were putting the finishing touches on Songs of Solidarity: The 1985 Farm Aid Concert. This exhibit, at the University of Illinois’s Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, examines the very first Farm Aid concert, held at the university’s Memorial Stadium, just a short walk from the museum.
The exhibit was curated by historian Dan Gilbert and doctoral student Dale Mize, in collaboration with curators from both the Champaign County Historical Museum and the Spurlock. But in many ways, the exhibit was crowd-sourced from the local community. Students from the university’s History Harvest class put out a call for community members to contribute photographs or artifacts from that first Farm Aid concert. Their yield was massive: hundreds of photographs, dozens of new oral history interviews and a number of one-of-a-kind artifacts.
Maybe most important is that a man named John Graham, who had been the main event producer at the University of Illinois at the time, brought his book of notes on every aspect of putting on the show. Graham’s journal is not an artifact in the exhibit, but it provided the basis for much of the exhibit’s design.
The exhibit does a beautiful job of putting the origins of Farm Aid into historical context, with emphasis on the early protests of the farm movement – from the American Agriculture Movement’s tractorcades to Washington DC, to protests at the Chicago Board of Trade. It then shows how Bob Dylan’s off-hand comment at Live Aid led Willie Nelson to approach Governor Jim Thompson about holding Farm Aid at the University of Illinois.
“While I’m here, I’d just like to say I hope that some of the money that’s raised for the people in Africa – maybe they could 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.” ~ Bob Dylan at Live Aid
The exhibit covers the logistics of putting on this massive show — for upwards of 80,000 people — in a matter of six weeks. It also showcases testimonials from many of the artists who performed, describing why the cause was so important to them. “I was born and grew up on a plantation,” B.B. King told one journalist. “I’m a farmer at heart — I just don’t own a farm. Willie Nelson asked me, and he’s a friend. I would do anything to help him. Farm Aid touches a lot of people I know, and I’d like to help.”
Something about the way the concert came together so quickly and earnestly made playing it more appealing, too. “I like the idea of this event so much better than Live Aid because we don’t have to be millionaires to be on the stage,” Exene Cervenka of the LA punk band X said at the time. “That was like a club or something. [Farm Aid] seems more grassroots and spontaneous.”
Among the artifacts on display in the exhibit is an Iowa Farm Unity Coalition trucker’s cap that Willie wore on stage at the start of the concert. He had signed it and, later, threw it into the crowd. Thirty nine years later, the person who caught the cap brought it to the History Harvest, and now it is =prominently displayed in the center of the exhibit.
Perhaps the most surprising artifact is a sheet of toilet paper with a slogan printed on it: “Let’s Wipe Out Farm Foreclosure.” Every bathroom in the stadium was equipped with dozens of rolls of this specially printed bath tissue!
In addition to these items and the t-shirts, hats, belt buckles and bandanas sold at the first Farm Aid, the exhibit features letters and newspaper clippings expressing concern for how the funds raised would be allocated (based on advice from farmers and farm organizations already dealing with the crisis, Farm Aid distributed the funds raised to grassroots organizations who were closest to those in need). And there are letters and op-eds thanking Willie and Farm Aid for shining a light on the ongoing crisis in farm country.
Songs of Solidarity opened on September 22nd and closes on January 11, 2026. If you can get to Champaign-Urbana in the coming weeks, please go check it out and let us know what you think!
