Bob Dylan Joins Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid 40 Lineup in Minneapolis

Bob Dylan has joined the all-star roster of Farm Aid 40 taking place Saturday (Sept. 20) at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the festival organizers have announced.

Dylan will be featured on the bill headlined by Farm Aid’s guiding board members — Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dave Matthews and Margo Price — along with Kenny Chesney, Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Lukas Nelson, and more. 

Also on the lineup will be Trampled by Turtles, Wynonna Judd, Steve Earle, Waxahatchee, Eric Burton of Black Pumas, Jesse Wells, Madeline Edwards and the Wisdom Indian Dancers.

Dylan, who has been touring with Willie Nelson this summer as part of the Outlaw Music Festival, last played the Farm Aid stage in Noblesville, Indiana on Sept. 23, 2023, as a surprise guest.

As Farm Aid marks four decades of advocacy for America’s independent family farmers, Dylan’s presence on the festival lineup resonates deeply.

It was Dylan, from the Philadelphia stage of the Live Aid benefit for African famine relief on July 13, 1985, who made the off-hand comment:  “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?”

Willie Nelson later recalled to Billboard, “The question hit me like a ton of bricks.” With the impossibly short lead time of six weeks, Nelson staged the first all-star Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Ill., on Sept. 22, 1985.

Dylan was among the remarkable lineup of country and rock musicians who played that very first Farm Aid, alongside Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, Don Henley, Billy Joel, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, Bonnie Raitt and many more—including the Tom Petty, who died in 2017, and Petty’s band, the Heartbreakers.  

Dylan’s early involvement with Farm Aid led to two other significant collaborations, with Tom Petty and, subsequently, the Traveling Wilburys.

At Farm Aid in 1985, Dylan performed with Petty and the Heartbreakers. “At that time, Tony Dimitriades, Tom’s manager, was in a business partnership with [the late] Elliot Roberts in Lookout Management” who represented Dylan, recalled Bill DeYoung, a music critic, author and Petty historian, in a 2017 interview with Billboard.  DeYoung for many years worked at the Gainesville Sun, the newspaper in Petty’s Florida hometown.  

“Dylan needed a band for the first Farm Aid,” says DeYoung. “Everything else sprang from that.”

“Everything else” included the True Confessions Tour that Dylan and Petty launched together early the following year, in February 1986, during which the Heartbreakers backed Dylan for some 60 shows in Australia, Japan and the United States — including two nights at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. and three nights at Madison Square Garden.

The singers also performed at the second Farm Aid on July 4, 1986 — via satellite from their tour stop at Rich Stadium, outside Buffalo, New York. A second outing, the Temples in Flames tour, followed in 1987. 

And the creative friendship between Dylan and Petty—born at Farm Aid—flourished.

In 1988, Dylan welcomed Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison to his studio in Malibu to record the song “Handle Me With Care.” Originally intended as the B-side to a single from Harrison’s Cloud Nine album, the song instead became the inspiration for the tongue-in-cheek supergroup The Traveling Wilburys.

So, from Farm Aid, Dylan found a potent touring partner and a hit recording collaboration. On Saturday, the legendary singer contributes to the goal of helping America’s family farmers, which he had first suggested on stage 40 years ago.