The historical events in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are in chronological order.

Billy Joel live in concert in Hamburg, Germany, 1990
Credit: © Frank Hempel—United Archives GmbH/Alamy
Author Michael Nordine
October 27, 2026

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What do Harry Truman, Lawrence of Arabia, space monkeys, and the Soviet-Afghan War have in common? All of them are among the 119 historical people and events immortalized in “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” Billy Joel’s rapid-fire hit about nearly every notable happening from 1949 (the year he was born) to 1989 (the year the song was released) — in more or less chronological order. 

The list — which includes the establishment of “Red China,” the rise of television, and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election, to name just a few — begins with Harry Truman and ends with the cola war between Coke and Pepsi. Technically, though, a couple of the events are ever so slightly out of order. The line “vaccine, England’s got a new queen,” for instance, might have you think that the 1955 announcement of Jonathan Salk’s polio vaccine preceded Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, but it was the other way around — she took the throne in 1953. The line “Ole Miss, John Glenn” should also technically be switched, as Glenn orbited Earth in February 1962 and the university was integrated in September, with Joel presumably making the switch consciously to fit the overall rhyming pattern.

Joel had the idea to write “We Didn’t Start the Fire” after a conversation with a friend of Sean Lennon, son of John Lennon. The friend lamented that the late ’80s were a terrible time to be 21. Joel understood how he felt: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21,” he responded, according to a 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” Lennon’s friend was unimpressed, countering that Joel had at least spent his childhood in the largely uneventful 1950s. “Wait a minute,” Joel said. “Didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” He certainly has now.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Billy Joel thinks the song is “terrible.”

If you can’t help finding “We Didn’t Start the Fire” a little annoying, you’re hardly alone. The song received mixed reviews despite its commercial success, and Joel himself has spoken unfavorably about it. “A song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ it’s really not much of a song,” he said in a 1993 interview with documentarian David Horn, adding that “it’s a terrible piece of music” while revealing that it was originally meant to be a country song. “When you take the melody by itself, terrible, it’s like a dentist drill,” Joel observed. Notably, it’s the only Billy Joel song for which the lyrics were written before the music.

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