Bob Dylan joins the roster for Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid 40

Bob Dylan will be part of the star-studded lineup for Farm Aid 40.

Festival organisers announced that the music icon will perform on September 20 at Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.

He joins a bill led by Farm Aid’s board members Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, and Margo Price, alongside Kenny Chesney, Billy Strings, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Lukas Nelson, and many others.

Dylan, who has been touring with Nelson this summer for the Outlaw Music Festival, last appeared on the Farm Aid stage in Indiana in 2023 as a surprise guest.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Farm Aid’s mission to support and advocate for independent family farmers across the United States.

It was Dylan who first raised the issue during his set at the Philadelphia Live Aid concert in 1985, held to raise funds for famine relief in Africa. He said, “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 and use it to pay the mortgages on some of the farms that the farmers here owe to the banks?”

Willie Nelson later reflected in an interview with Billboard, “The question hit me like a ton of bricks.” Inspired by Dylan’s words, Nelson put together the very first Farm Aid concert just six weeks later, on September 22 of that year.