Billy Joel’s pop song history lesson that is “We Didn’t Start the Fire” got an update following Brigitte Bardot’s death on Sunday.
The 1989 song lists 59 people— both famous and infamous — that the Piano Man immortalized as being important to the mid-century period.
And with the French actress’ death at 91, only three of the notables mentioned remain alive, according to an update on Reddit that showed a chart of every name listed.
Those listed in the song include: 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, Ernest Hemingway, Nazi Adolf Eichman, Bob Dylan, John Glenn, Pope Paul VI, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Ronald Reagan, former Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini, Sally Ride and subway shooter Bernie Goetz.
Of those mentioned, 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.
Joel said in a 1994 question and answer session at Oxford University that the song was inspired by a conversation he had with a friend of John Lennon’s son, 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.
He said 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.’”
That sparked laughter from the audience.
“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 the song spanned 40 years — 1949 until 1989 when he wrote it — and felt it had a “symmetry” to it.
Still, he had mixed feelings about the song, which he told the audience: “I didn’t think it was really that good to begin with.”
Bardot, who died on Sunday, was a French actress and model who became a sex symbol of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
She was known for movies like “…And God Created Woman” and “La Vérité.”
She also became known as an activist for animal rights.
“The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation,” it said in a statement to the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Sunday.
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