Spurlock Museum, professor Dan Gilbert and students in his History Harvest class, and the Champaign County History Museum have partnered to create a new exhibit commemorating the 1985 Farm Aid Relief Concert.
When you think of major concerts in the history of rock and country music, Champaign probably doesn’t spring to mind. But in September 1985, Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois was the site of the first Farm Aid relief concert for American farm families, featuring a lineup of legends like Willie Nelson, Neil Young, B. B. King, Loretta Lynn, and Bob Dylan. In the 40 years since, Farm Aid has raised over $70 million to build a vibrant, family farm-centered system of agriculture in America.
History Harvest
Inspired by this local event with ties to American music, labor, and agricultural histories, professor Dan Gilbert made Farm Aid the focus of study for the spring 2023 class called History Harvest. History Harvest is a collaborative public history project in which students engage with members of the public to collect and digitize documents and artifacts of historical interest for scholarly and community research.
“Since moving to Champaign-Urbana twelve years ago,” says Dan, “I have grown more and more interested in learning about the inaugural Farm Aid concert. As someone interested in the history of both popular music and social movements, I think Farm Aid ’85 was a hugely important event. The fact that it happened here in our community makes it even more exciting to explore. I was inspired by the work that my colleague Professor Kathy Oberdeck did with her students in the History Harvest classes that she taught focusing on local queer histories, which culminated in the extraordinary Sewn in Memory exhibit at the Spurlock. Having started to conduct some of my own research on Farm Aid ‘85 as a pivotal historical event, I was struck that the History Harvest frame- work might work well for this subject.”
Sewn in Memory (on display in 2021–22) proved to be a meaningful exhibit for community visitors and incredible learning experiences for students. It also initiated a relationship between Spurlock and the Greater Community AIDS Project of East Central Illinois that has continued in collaborative programming. Spurlock was so happy that Dan wanted to continue the History-Spurlock partnership by using the 2023 class’s work on Farm Aid as the basis for a large exhibit to mark the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid in 2025.
Partnering with Champaign County History Museum
Because of the local history focus of this class, the Champaign County History Museum was also a logical partner. CCHM already has a collection of material from Farm Aid and has been wanting to expand the collection and resources related to it by talking to people who attended and organized the event in 1985.
Dan, his students, and CCHM staff ran a History Harvest event in April that invited community members to record oral histories and digitize photos and records related to Farm Aid. Memorial Stadium, site of the original concert, hosted the activities in the 77 Club. Some generous participants also donated objects or digital copies to CCHM.
“The students had worked very hard on the event: planning every aspect, staffing the registration table, operating the digital scanning stations, conducting the interviews, and cleaning up at the end,” says Dan. “They came away from the experience really fired up about the whole thing. Many of them expressed excitement about having been able to connect their academic interests and training in history to a real-life project with community partners. Several students described being moved by the passionate and emotional responses of interviewees as they recounted their experiences attending or working at the concert.”
Connor Monson, Manager of the Champaign County History Museum at the time, was also enthusiastic about the Harvest. “It was terrific. The event became a reunion of sorts for dozens of individuals: sharing memories of their favorite performances, the people they were with, or the rain that poured down for most of the day. The stories were fascinating. In all, the event helped us take in over 20 oral histories, and the students and museum staff received over 800 photos and documents.” These materials, plus others already in CCHM’s collections, will form the basis of the exhibit at Spurlock.
Building Meaningful Exhibits
As part of their final class projects, Dan’s students also submitted ideas for what they’d like to see in the exhibit. “The students created some exciting preliminary proposals for the exhibit. These ideas include sections featuring concert memorabilia, official planning documents and correspondence, materials from some of the organizations that received funding from the concert proceeds, and some of the extraordinary photographs of both the performances themselves and the larger spectacle of the event.”
We’re all eager to build on the potential within History Harvest to combine meaningful opportunities for students and public-facing offerings for museum audiences. The museum field is trying to support more complex investigations and presentations of the past, and we need historians more than ever. At the same time, Dan says that “historians like me who spend most of our time in archives and classrooms (or with our noses in books) have so much to learn from museum professionals and the publics they serve. It is so exciting to be working on a campus where these kinds of collaborations are possible—and to be exploring a topic that seems to be of interest to a large number of folks in our community. I am excited to see where these next few years take us!”
Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the 2023-2024 Spurlock Museum Newsletter. Image 1: Image captured at History Harvest event. Image courtesy of Champaign County History Museum.
Songs of Solidarity: The 1985 Farm Aid Concert Exhibit
Created in collaboration with the Champaign County History Museum and students from the U of I History Harvest class, this exhibit features photos, documents, and objects from the first Farm Aid concert, stories from the farm crisis, and hope for the future of American farming. The exhibit will run from August 29, 2025 to January 11, 2026.
Join Spurlock for the public opening on Sunday, September 21, with remarks by exhibit curator Professor Dan Gilbert (History, Labor and Employment Relations) and light refreshments highlighting local ingredients.