Only 3 Remain from Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ Litany of Names

Singer Billy Joel included many names in his song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Some had already passed, while others were still alive. Now, with the death of French actress Brigitte Bardot Sunday, only three are still…

Sandra RhodesDec 31, 20253 min read

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Singer Billy Joel included many names in his song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Some had already passed, while others were still alive. Now, with the death of French actress Brigitte Bardot Sunday, only three are still alive, per Fox News.

The song, released in 1989, lists 59 people. Some were famous, others infamous.

Those listed are: Harry Truman, Doris Day, singer Johnnie Ray, columnist Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, Soviet spies the Rosenbergs, Sugar Ray Robinson, Marlon Brando, Dwight Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, boxer Rocky Marciano, Liberace, philosopher George Santayana, Joseph Stalin, Soviet Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov, former Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, Winthrop Rockefeller, baseball player Roy Campanella, Roy Cohn, former President of Argentina Juan Peron, Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, Albert Einstein, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, Princess Grace, Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Jack Kerouac, former Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, former French President Charles de Gaulle, murderer Charles Starkweather, Buddy Holly, mafioso Vito Genovese, Fidel Castro, first South Korean President Syngman Rhee, John F. Kennedy, Chubby Checker

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Now, only three remain, according to an update on Reddit that showed a chart of every name listed.

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Currently, musicians Bob Dylan and Chubby Checker, who are both 84, and Bernie Goetz, who was charged in the shooting of four Black teens on a subway in New York in 1984 after they allegedly tried to rob him and is 87 years old, remain alive.

In 1994, Joel said at Oxford University that the song was inspired by a conversation he had with a friend of Sean Lennon.

“I’d turned 40 years old. It was around my birthday. I was in the studio. I was trying to think of ideas for songs, and I met a guy who had just turned 21,” Joel, 76, said of Lennon’s friend.

The friend told him, “’It’s a terrible time to be 21,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I remember when I turned 21 I thought it was an awful time. We had Vietnam, and you know, there was drug problems and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it was different for you because you were a kid in the ‘50s, and everyone knows that nothing happened in the ’50s.'”

But history reveals otherwise.

“So, I thought ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ever heard of the Korean War? Suez Canal crisis, you know?’ So, I started writing these things out, almost like an exercise, and I started getting this idea for a song,” Joel said.

Joel said the song goes from 1949 until 1989 —when he wrote it.

Joel added, “I didn’t think it was really that good to begin with.”

“When I was a kid, we didn’t have a television, so I read a lot. 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,” Joel said.