Willie Nelson’s 2026 Farm Aid: Best Moments From Neil Young, John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews & More

It is only 11 miles from the Farm Aid venue to First Landing State Park, a spot on the Virginia coast where — in April 1607 — the first permanent European settlers landed in what would someday become the American nation. “Despite the abundant national resources, the colonists struggled to survive without the knowledge and aid of the Indigenous people,” a park sign reads. In a Farm Aid tradition, acknowledging the roots of American farm land, the Wisdom Indian Dancers opened the festival, with a performance that Margo Price called “captivating,” as she sang “The Lord’s Prayer,” accompanied by the dancers.

Pierce made his Farm Aid debut as fans were coming through the amphitheater gates. They should have arrived earlier. Pierce called for “dignity for those who harvest our food” before performing a masterful song, “Madonna of the San Joaquin,” from his new album, Songs for the Heavy Hearted. He sang: “Picking your fruit ′til her arms are sore/ But now you kick her out your big front door/ You sent the sheriff and the marshal and the deputy/ So she’s running through the night just trying to stay free.”

Meola has been a frequent guest artist with Willie Nelson at Farm Aid in the past, but Saturday she graduated to a full set and earned every minute onstage. 

Wearing a white dress embroidered with flowers and the words “Farm Aid” at the neckline, Meola enchanted early arrivals with songs including “Day Dream,” “Postcards to Heaven,” and the wonderfully titled “Sleeping With My Boots On,” from her newly released album, Lucky To Be.

A founding member of Our Native Daughters, alongside Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, Kiah told the morning Farm Aid crowd of her affection for the “freaks and geeks” of her East Tennessee home.

She accompanied herself on a spare, intense banjo in a minor key, as she opened her set with deep, gospel-style vocals on the Blind Willie Johnson classic “Soul of a Man.” In “Empire of Love,” she sang: “My home in Appalachia is still calling me/ Give me a mountain, something divine.” 

As she departed the stage, she shouted: “Let’s get that blue tsunami going!”

Three sisters by different mothers, I’m With Her took the stage with matching white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Proud to Be a Farmer’s Friend.”

The triple threat of Sara Watkins on fiddle, Sarah Jarosz on mandolin and Aoife O’Donovan on guitar created a joyful noise with their intertwining vocals, opening their set with “Year After Year” with its recurring, challenging lyric “If not now, when?”

“What a special day!” said O’Donovan. “We are so proud to be on this stage,” echoed Jarosz.

Later in the day, I’m With Her added their beautiful vocals to sets by Nathaniel Rateliff and Dave Matthews.

Calling his musical style “Afro-Appalachian,” the singer-songwriter Mon Rovîa takes his name from the capital of the West African nation of Libera, where he was born, before he was adopted by an American family at age.

“I hope you see yourself in some of these songs,” he said, wearing a black T-shirt bearing the slogan in white: “Monopolies Taste Terrible.”

With his band, which included banjo and steel guitar, he sang “Crooked the Road,” describing it as a story of shared burdens. “We’re all carrying the things these farmers are going through,” he told the crowd.

Following up her Farm Aid debut at last year’s 40th anniversary festival in Minneapolis, Ferrell brought her bluegrass magic to her early afternoon set.

With flowers woven into her braided hair, she was backed by a trio playing fiddle, banjo and stand-up bass, singing songs including “Lighthouse” from her album Trail of Flowers. 

“Could you be the lighthouse for my soul/ could you be the guidin’ light,” she sang. “Tell me everything’s alright

Could you be the one that I love so?”

Ferrell has recorded with fellow Farm Aid musicians, including Lukas Nelson and Margo Price as well as Ray LaMontagne, Post Malone and Zach Bryan.

Welles is the greatest topical singer-songwriter of his generation, mining a tradition that includes Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. He rips lyrics from the headlines and, now playing with a full band, delivers his songs with ferocity.

In his third consecutive Farm Aid appearance, but his first with his rocking foursome, his set that ratcheted up the festival energy, Welles offered one of his best-known songs that certainly resonated in this region where, activists say, there were 16 times more ICE arrests in the in 2025 than in 2024. 

“If you’re lackin’ control and authority/ come with me and hunt down minorities/ Join ICE!”

In concert, Welles is known for perfectly chosen cover songs and that was true once again at Farm Aid as he rocked through “I Won’t Back Down” from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

“Get people in charge who know what they’re doing,” shouted Campbell as drummer Steve Ferrone unleashed a rapid fire attack, launching the Dirty Knobs into the blues stomp of “Shake These Blues.”

Campbell, whose history with Farm Aid goes back to the festival’s debut when the Heartbreakers were Bob Dylan’s backing band, is having a magnificent next act with the Dirty Knobs, touring this summer behind their fourth album, Mission of Mercy. (The band plays Town Hall in New York on Wednesday [9/30]).

But Campbell does not shy from embracing his legacy, sharing lead vocals with the Knobs’ guitarist Chris Holt on the Heartbreakers’ hits “Even The Losers” and “Running Down A Dream.”

For those keeping track, it was the second set of the day to evoke the spirit of the great Tom Petty.

Young Texan Ty Myers proudly wears his influences, and great musical taste, on his sleeve. With a touring band that includes a three-piece horn section, Myers opened his set with his cover of “Two Trains” from Little Feat. His performance included his Country Airplay hit “Ends of the Earth.”  

But he also welcomed Willie Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, to accompany him on Nelson’s “Write Your Own Songs.” The song is one of the 10 tracks on Myers’ newly released (and brilliantly titled) Two Braids & The Truth: My Tribute to Willie.

Willie Nelson’s eldest son with wife Annie, Lukas Nelson looks like a movie idol (see A Star Is Born), has a penchant for penning great long songs and sings in a Texas twang. (Sound familiar?)

From his album American Romance, he opened his set with “Pretty Much,” with its great chorus, “I pretty much fell in love right then.”

He brought the Virginia crowd to experience the beauty of the Texas Hill Country of his youth with “Just Outside of Austin.”

And, while backed by a full band, Nelson proved how he’s pushing what he’s called, “my wind instrument,” his voice, to new limits in “Die Alone” and the barn burner “Find Yourself.”

Proud inheritors of the “red dirt” tradition of Oklahoma country music, the Turnpike Troubadours have had a tumultuous history as a band. But this performance was a new milestone for the group.

“This is our first Farm Aid,” said frontman Evan Felker, giving a shout-out to their fellow Oklahomans on the bill, the Wisdom Indian Dancers.

The fiddle-fired septet turned the Virginia amphitheater into a Saturday night dancehall that made their Farm Aid arrival well worth the wait

With his R&B soul band the Night Sweats, Rateliff has regularly blown the roof off Farm Aid sheds. But at this festival, he played a reflective solo, acoustic set.

“This is my first time to come here alone,” Rateliff said. It was, he noted, his fifth Farm Aid, his first year as a new dad and his return to singing after a cervical disc replacement which threw his future as a performer into question.

But there was no question that Rateliff was as riveting as a solo artist as one of the best frontmen around. 

Wearing his “American Agriculture Movement” cap, he sang “for the future I want for my child — to walk in open spaces that have not been taken over.” The crowd, which included anti-data center protesters, roared its approval.

“We’re going to sing one for Miss Dolly,” said Price as she gleefully covered Dolly Parton’s “9 To 5.”  

Parton was not the only great songwriter to gain a tribute from Price as she also pointedly covered John Prine’s “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.”

And she brought out Dave Matthews and Jesse Welles for her rendition of Blaze Foley’s “Oval Room” from her new album, Days of Unrest. She sang: “In his oval room, in his rockin’ chair/ he’s the president, but I don’t care/ he’s a business man, he got business ties/ He got dollar signs in both his eyes.”

Matthews welcomed I’m With Her for his performance of “Papertown,” which he has recorded for a forthcoming documentary on the closing of the Pactiv Evergreen paper mill in Canton, N.C., three years ago. The mill provided jobs to some 1,100 workers in the small town outside of Asheville, N.C.

In the traditional Farm Aid format of his performances with Tim Reynolds, Matthews cast a spell of acoustic guitar wizardry over the crowd with songs including “Save Me,” “Don’t Drink The Water” and “Ants Marching.”

Remarkably, recalled Mellencamp in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins which was broadcast during the network’s live coverage of Farm Aid, he and Willie Nelson were not acquainted before they co-founded the organization for family farmers with Neil Young in 1985.

But Nelson was organizing the first festival and heard Mellencamp’s hit song “Rain on the Scarecrow” and called up the Indiana-raised rocker. “We were so naïve,” recalled Mellencamp of the musicians’ belief that if they just highlighted the plight of family farmers, the government would respond.

In Mellencamp’s hit-laden Farm Aid set, “Rain on the Scarecrow” was once again a standout as he sang: “This land fed a nation/ This land made me proud/ And son, I’m just sorry/ There’s no legacy for you now.”

“I was lying in a burned out basement/ With the full moon in my eyes.” It may be one of the greatest lyric images in rock music and, as Neil Young sang the line from “After the Gold Rush” to open his set, it was clear his Farm Aid performance would be one for the ages.

Through the years, Farm Aid fans never quite knew which flannel-shirted Neil Young would show up, the master of acoustic ballads or the guitar-slashing rocker. Fans on Saturday got both.

In the wake of his latest, largely acoustic album Second Song (his 50th studio album!), Young offered a veritable greatest-hits set of ballads including “Comes a Time,” “Old Man” and “Harvest Moon,” as well as “Lost Highway” and “Earth Girl.”

Then out came Old Black, Young’s vintage electric guitar, and the Chrome Hearts — with Willie Nelson’s younger son, Micah, on second guitar — roared through “Powderfinger” and “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Young’s newly ad-libbed line in the chorus.

“Take America Back!” he shouted.

At 93, Nelson is an undeniable icon of American culture. Since 1985, through Farm Aid, to the nation’s struggling family farmers, he has brought a simple message: you are not alone.

Farm Aid takes place once a year. But Americans choose where to buy their food every day. Nelson and his fellow musicians ask fans to make deliberate choices in what they put on their family table.

Through the years, Nelson’s sets have varied little. “Whiskey River” was the perennial opener Saturday. And as Nelson played favorites like “On the Road Again” or “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” with a non-stop pace, you can imagine a Texas roadhouse band not wanting to give couples any reason to leave the dance floor. “Angels Flying Too Close to the Ground,” with Nelson’s amazing solo on his trusty guitar, Trigger, gave those couples time for a slow dance.  

Then once more, Nelson brought us to church, gathering the days’ musicians around him for the traditional closing of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “I Saw the Light.”

But wait. 

First, came the song which Nelson added to his Farm Aid set with the festival in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in 2024. It is a cover of “Last Leaf on the Tree,” originally recorded by Tom Waits. 

For Nelson, who has written that he believes in reincarnation, it is a reassuring message to his legions of fans: “I’ll be here through eternity,” he sang, “If you wanna know how long/ If they cut down this tree/ I’ll show up in a song.”