Teachers Fire Up History Students With Billy Joel Hit

The history lesson in Steve Trotter’s fifth-period class at Los Amigos High School was as good as gold--even a gold record.

The record, in this case, was Billy Joel’s No. 1 hit single, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Like thousands of other teachers across the country, Trotter used the song--a staccato riff on world history recounting significant events from 1949 to 1989--as a teaching tool to make teen-agers more aware of events that, though recent, might just as well be ancient history point to many of them.

“I asked some of the students who Walter Winchell was,” Trotter said, referring to the famous columnist mentioned in Joel’s song. “They said it was the guy who makes the doughnuts.”

In the song, which begins in the year Joel was born (1949), the pop star reels off a list of names and places. For 1949, for example, Joel sings, “Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio.”

On a special cassette version of the song provided to 40,000 junior and senior high school classrooms nationwide, Joel, in a 10-minute address to students, says it was misconceptions about history--such as the mistaken belief that Winchell was famous for doughnuts--that led him to write and record the song.

“I’ve gotten a lot of questions about 1960--the year starts (on the song) with U-2,” Joel says on the tape. “Now, a lot of people come and say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know that band was out in 1960.’ I said, ‘I don’t mean the band, I mean the spy plane.’ ”

In Trotter’s fifth-period class, the students were familiar with most of the names in the first line of the song, but got stuck on Winchell (“Doughnut man!” according to one student) and Ray, the early-’50s rock ‘n’ roll idol who often cried while crooning. Several of the students in the class identified him as the second basemen by the same name on the California Angels.

Most of the students said they liked the song better after they learned what Joel was singing about.

“It goes pretty fast,” one student said. “I had no idea what he was trying to get across until I saw the words” on a large poster Trotter displayed at the front of the class. The poster was distributed by Scholastic magazine, which sent out the tape, poster and a sample teaching lesson in Jan. 26 issues of its Junior Scholastic and Update magazines.

“As far as the musical value,” another student offered, “I would rate it in the low 70s. . . . But the lyrical content, I think, deserves 100.”

On the tape, Joel says that the song and his message is drawing rave reviews in other classrooms across the country.

“I think the letters I’ve gotten from teachers and students alike have been really encouraging,” Joel says on the tape. “A lot of people tend to think history is just this drab series of boring names and dates that you just have to connect to pass the test.”

Elaine Schock(, a publicist for Joel, said the performer endorsed the distribution of the song to classes because he had received “a ton of letters” from teachers who had devised lessons based on it.

Joel, a high-school dropout, said on the tape that the idea for the song “came from my own desire actually to be a history teacher (and) my own love of history.”

“I always find history to be a fascinating thing,” he says. “I’m very interested in why things are the way they are today, why are we here, why are we like this, why is the world the way it is, and it’s because of what happened before. . . . I find the truth is much more interesting than fiction, and if the song has helped generate interest in it, then that’s a good thing.”

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