What Billy Joel’s Songs Say About American History

In the late 1980s, Billy Joel found himself in a recording studio debating history with a young man. The man lamented the social troubles of his generation, including the AIDS epidemic and homelessness. But when Joel empathized and shared his own generational experiences, the man wasn’t convinced they were analogous. “He said, 'C'mon, nothing happened in the 50s and early 60s,’” Joel recounted in a 1989 interview. “And the history teacher in me went, 'Whoa, didn't you ever hear of the Korean War, the Suez Canal, the Hungarian freedom fighters?'”

In response, Joel wrote what became one of his signature tunes: 1989’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The pop-rock song is a frenetic chronicle of 40 years of historical names and events, starting with Harry Truman’s 1949 inauguration to baseball stars, movies, authors, political assassinations, scandals and geopolitical skirmishes.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which became Joel’s third No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, wasn’t a thematic outlier. Since launching his career in the early 1970s, Joel frequently used his songwriting to chronicle (and respond to) American historical events.

Born in 1949, Joel loved all kinds of music, though his favorites included doo-wop groups, Elvis Presley and the Beatles, and he played with the hard rock group Attila before going solo. Joel also grew up on Long Island without a television, “so I read a lot,” he said in 1989 to The Boston Herald. “I became a history nut. I wanted to be a history teacher. I always wanted to know what happened to get us to where we are.”

Early in his career, that reverence for music history and curiosity about the world around him led him to write songs about his upbringing. His debut album in 1971, Cold Spring Harbor, is named after a hamlet near where he grew up. That Joel referenced his local area makes sense to Jason Hanley, the vice president of education and visitor engagement at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, who co-authored a chapter in “We Didn't Start the Fire": Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies.

“By the 70s, [we’re] seeing a mass migration of people out of New York City onto Long Island,” says Hanley. “It was a place where these different East Coast cultures were starting to blend. But Long Island was also finding itself on some level, and I think Billy crystallized that experience.”

As Joel began touring and seeing more of America, his worldview expanded, and he began commenting on the rise of (and cultural shifts brought about by) population migrations of the 1970s in the United States. While living in Los Angeles, Joel wrote “Los Angelenos,” a strutting Elton John-esque rock song which observes the impact of an influx of new California residents. Other songs from this era comment on the changes wrought by suburban flight, such as "The Great Suburban Showdown" and "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)."

The title track of the 1973 album Piano Man, a song inspired by Joel’s own short-lived gig playing piano in a lounge, describes a bar filled with regulars who are plagued by loneliness and ennui. The titular character of “Captain Jack," meanwhile, is a drug dealer selling his wares to bored young people who take their comfort for granted.

“It's about coming out of the New York suburbs," Joel told John Kalodner in 1974 of the latter song. "But in my travels, I have seen a lot of the same suburb all over the country. The song is sort of brutal, but sometimes it is good to be brutal and offend people—it keeps them on their toes."

Even still, Joel sometimes played fast and loose with history. For example, 1973’s “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” uses fictional references to the life of the notorious 19th-century criminal to describe a wild bartender Joel knew on Long Island. (Among other things, Joel notes Billy the Kid’s robberies took place “from Utah to Oklahoma,” while the real-life crook operated in Arizona and New Mexico.)

Joel’s penchant for combining personal observations with vivid fictional characters makes these historical songs unique, Hanley observes. “The songs of his that are about historical moments [are almost] always written from the perspective of somebody experiencing it,” he says. “What you get then is this musician who's writing from a very personal space. But he's also writing these characters that he sees around him. He's writing about how people are experiencing the moment he's living through.”

As Joel’s songwriting grew more confident, his subject matter also became more sophisticated. Take “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway),” which was written from the perspective of someone looking back and describing what it was like to live through an apocalypse that hit New York years before.

It was a not-so-veiled metaphor for the financial crisis affecting New York City in the mid-1970s. “New York was in pretty bad shape,” Joel later recalled. “The city was dirty, there were strikes all over the place, there was a lot of crime. It was national news when New York applied to the federal government for federal aid, and they turned them down.”

At the same time, the troubles alluded to in “Miami 2017” were also plaguing many other cities. “It's the Cleveland story,” Hanley says. “It's the Detroit story. It's Pittsburgh. It's all these places dealing with the mid-70s economic shifts, cultural shifts, manufacturing bases shift.”

Joel would continue exploring these broad societal changes in the 1980s, starting with “It's Still Rock and Roll to Me,” a biting critique of the way buzzy genres such as punk and new wave were seen as new things, rather than continuations of past musical movements.

On a more serious note, 1982's album The Nylon Curtain included “Allentown,” a deeply political song lamenting the end of the American dream. The protagonist is disheartened by a lack of career mobility and prosperity, disillusioned by the broken promises of post-World War II America (“Well, we're waiting here in Allentown/For the Pennsylvania we never found”). Seven years later, Joel would release “The Downeaster ‘Alexa’,” which examines the plight of a Long Island fisherman facing a similar career crossroads as the world changes around him.

Even more provocative is “Goodnight Saigon,” a 1982 midtempo ballad written from the perspective of soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. Joel peppers the lyrics with specific details (e.g., listening to a Doors cassette) to make the scenes more vivid, and uses musical flourishes associated with patriotic music, like snare drum rolls and a majestic choir, to reinforce his commentary.

That “Goodnight Saigon” emerged years after the Vietnam War ended amplified its emotional message. “It is almost like he's got a little bit of historical perspective already on the things he's writing about,” Hanley says, “so that he can look back at recent history, but think about what that emotional impact is or how it affected people.”

Although Joel’s songs often reference specific points in U.S. history, they have been malleable enough to evolve with the times. In 2023, the rock band Fall Out Boy recorded an updated version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” with new lyrics about more modern historical moments (for example, “Michael Jordan, 23, YouTube killed MTV”).

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Joel performed “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” at a benefit at Madison Square Garden. Rather than the song describing the complete destruction of New York City, he noted how it now represented resilience. "I wrote that song 25 years ago,” he said at the event. “I thought it was going to be a science fiction song; I never thought it would really happen. But unlike the end of that song, we ain't going anywhere!"