Performers of Color
There were only three performers of color, B.B. King, Charley Pride, and Johnny Rodriguez, featured at the FarmAid concert out of a total of over fifty performers. Only King and Rodriguez performed live as Charley Pride’s performance was broadcasted via a recorded video.[1] However, many reporters praised FarmAid as an example of a diverse American community coming together to raise awareness for struggling farmers and enjoying the best of American rock, country, and blues. John Bowman gave voice to this opinion when he said, “For the most part I saw a pleasant, happy helping of America enjoying a few hours of song together.” He believed that the diversity of FarmAid was apparent “when you start to think of the range of styles and ages– from the Beach Boys to Eddie Van Halen, from B.B. King to Rickie Lee Jones– you realize just how diverse this concert was. And, just as diverse as the lineup of entertainers was the crowd watching. I saw babies, youngsters, teenagers, collegiates and elderly couples.”[2] But in this article, Bowman fails to acknowledge the presence of race in his vision of FarmAid’s diversity. The coverage of the three performers of color at FarmAid emphasizes just how muted the discussion of race was in relation to the concert.
B.B. King was one of the most well known and celebrated blues musicians at the time, and gave an electrifying performance. Gary Graff said, for example, that King “brought the house down.”[3] However, in many newspaper articles about the concert, including Graff’s, King’s performance was only recognized in a sentence or two. In the Indianapolis Star’s full page feature of the concert the only mention of B.B. King is, “B.B. King the only black headliner at the show was greeted with a big ovation.” Also, reporters generally ignored the fact that he grew up in a sharecropping family on a Mississippi plantation, and in doing so ignored the history and representation of African American farmers in their discussion of the FarmAid concert.[4] Charley Pride’s performance received a similarly brief summary from the Indianapolis Star which wrote, “Charley Pride was relayed to the crowd via video, and when the televised coverage came on at 7 pm, the fans really went wild.”[5] Coverage of Johnny Rodriguez, the only Latino performer at the concert, is even harder to find. While many of the newspaper articles that talked about B.B. King and Charley Pride noted that they were the only African American artists at the concert, they chose not to question why this was the case and gave their performances very little attention. These reporters revealed FarmAid’s lack of racial diversity and their own failure to have a deeper discussion of race and its relation to FarmAid.
However, there were some reporters that acknowledged the lack of African American artists and questioned this aspect of the concert. Robert Hilburn, in an article for the Los Angeles Times, argued against the views of Bowman when he said, “the failure to include more black acts kept the show from being a true celebration of contemporary American music.”[6] In an article for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Jon Bream asserted that “the Farm Aid roster was not a perfect representation of American music or even of the music connected to farmers.” He believed that blues as a genre and especially African American blues artists were underrepresented. In the same article, Bream includes the responses of Willie Nelson and John Cougar Mellencamp, two of the main organizers of the concert, to the claims that FarmAid did not have enough African American performers. Nelson was quoted as saying, “it’s our fault, not theirs . . . there was no way to get a hold of all those people in that little time.” Mellencamp added that he “spoke to a lot of black artists . . . you got to understand these people have a lot of other causes. They’ve really been fighting a battle for their entire history.”[7]
When looking back on the FarmAid concert of 1985, one has to wonder if it can truly be called diverse, like John Bowman believed, or if Robert Hilburn and Jon Bream were right to claim that FarmAid underrepresented different people and identities. Our changing consciousness of race, music, and farming in the decades that have passed since 1985 gives us a new way to understand and experience the concert, and ultimately forces us to rethink the inclusivity of the FarmAid concert, message, and community.