40 Great Moments From 40 Years of Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid: ‘It’s the Music and the Message That Opens Up People’s Hearts’

Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid is dissimilar immoderate different festival. It has ever been astir much than the music.

Launched by Nelson and chap musicians successful 1985 to respond to the economical situation that was devastating household farmers and their communities, Farm Aid this twelvemonth marks its 40th day arsenic music’s longest moving performance for a cause.

This year’s Farm Aid takes spot Saturday (Sept. 20) astatine Huntington Bank Stadium successful Minneapolis with a measure headlined by Farm Aid’s guiding committee members—Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dave Matthews and Margo Price—along with Kenny Chesney, Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Lukas Nelson, Trampled by Turtles, Wynonna Judd, Steve Earle, Waxahatchee, Eric Burton of Black Pumas, Jesse Wells, Madeline Edwards and the Wisdom Indian Dancers.

Like each the artists who person appeared astatine Farm Aid earlier them, these performers volition donate their time, expenses and fees to assistance the household farmers who provender the nation.

Farm Aid fans cognize that, erstwhile a year, Nelson and friends person taken to stages crossed the state for a high-profile amusement to payment America’s autarkic household farmers.

What they whitethorn not realize, adjacent aft 40 years, is that Farm Aid has helped power a profound displacement successful the taste scenery of the country. The enactment deserves recognition for promoting galore of the astir important changes successful nutrient civilization successful the United States: the maturation of farmers’ markets, the dispersed of farm-to-table restaurants, and the emergence of sustainable farming methods that are helping to code clime change. Through the years, with days of sessions preceding the performance itself, Farm Aid has evolved arsenic an impassioned yearly gathering for activists progressive successful environmental, radical and societal justness issues, arsenic good arsenic farming.

“It’s the operation of the euphony and the connection that is truthful important,” Farm Aid’s erstwhile enforcement manager Carolyn Mugar erstwhile said. “What happens astatine a Farm Aid performance opens up people’s hearts.” 

Farm Aid, of course, is portion of a large concatenation of musicians leveraging their songs for nine — from the singers who joined Martin Luther King Jr. for the March connected Washington successful 1963, to Pete Seeger’s pass-the-basket concerts successful the precocious 1960s to motorboat the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, to George Harrison’s Concerts for Bangladesh astatine Madison Square Garden successful 1971, to Bob Geldof’s Live Aid mega payment for Africa famine alleviation in1985, to the poverty-fighting Global Citizen Festival launched successful 2012, to the FireAid benefits earlier this year, and countless different initiatives done the decades.

Musicians person often offered their talents to conscionable the needs of the moment— and past moved on. The absorption and longevity of Farm Aid is unique.

What besides sets Farm Aid isolated is the inclusive, charitable and pugnacious tone of laminitis Willie Nelson. “Farming was my archetypal job,” helium erstwhile told Billboard. “I picked ­cotton. I pulled corn. I knew firsthand what it meant to farm. I knew damn good however pugnacious it was. My workplace roots are deep-seated successful the ungraded of my idiosyncratic story.”

And successful his tiny hometown of Abbott, Texas, wherever helium attended the United Methodist Church, Nelson recalled, “we had a ­collection box, and adjacent though we were ­struggling financially, I knew determination were folks with acold greater struggles. As portion of a ­loving community, I was taught the motivation work of ­helping those successful need.”

Farm Aid’s guiding committee members “are conscionable similar farmers, they ne'er springiness up,” Mugar has said. “They&rsq...