In case you haven’t heard this great song by Billy Joel, I recommend listening to it before reading the rest of this post…you can listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
Just today, while listening to some Billy Joel, I was reintroduced to this great great song. In high school, our Outdoor Pursuits teacher, Mr. Fletcher, gave us an assignment to look up every historical reference in this song and find out what it meant. The assignment was worth something like 112 points – which equaled the number of historical references in the song. He was a huge history buff, and thought it would be an interested assignment. Which it was. However, whether he knew it or not, there are websites devoted to this song, and each historical reference is linked to a corresponding page with some information about that reference. So the assignment, while informative, was quite easy.
Here are the lyrics to the song, with the references linked (I’m sure some of the links don’t work as this is an old site):
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I”, and “The Catcher in the Rye”
Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
CHORUS
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
Josef Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien Phu and “Rock Around the Clock”
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team
Davy Crockett, “Peter Pan”, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez
CHORUS
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Zhou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide
Buddy Holly, “Ben-Hur”, space monkey, Mafia
hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no go
U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo
CHORUS
Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion
“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say
CHORUS
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon, back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollolah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
“Wheel of Fortune” , Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola Wars, I can’t take it anymore
CHORUS
We didn’t start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on…
A super video of the song: Billy Joel – “We Didn’t Start the Fire”