"...To stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart" - remembering Bill Ayres, another great one
- Letters To You
- 50 minutes ago
- 5 min read
August 25, 2026
So shortly after the passing of Dave Marsh, we've lost another great man, who also happened to be one of Dave's close friends, and a key ally in their shared efforts to end hunger. Bill Ayres, the co-founder, former Executive Director and Ambassador of WhyHunger, died last Saturday at the age of 85.
In 1975, Ayres co-founded WhyHunger - originally known as World Hunger Year - with another close friend of his, musician Harry Chapin. Upon Chapin's tragic and untimely death in 1981, Ayres pressed on in leading the anti-hunger organization and various campaigns that they had started together. That history is told effectively and movingly in Rick Korn's 2020 documentary film Harry Chapin: When in Doubt, Do Something. (Click here to watch the film's trailer and click here to purchase a DVD of the film.) Ayres appears in the film and also served as one of its executive producers. Also appearing in the film are Dave Marsh, who - as a critic, editor, and journalist for Rolling Stone at the time - covered the 1978 U.S. Congressional hearings on hunger at which Chapin testified, and Bruce Springsteen, who would become an early and longtime supporter of World Hunger Year/WhyHunger.
When Harry Chapin received a Congressional Gold Medal posthumously as part of a 1987 Carnegie Hall tribute concert, Springsteen performed Chapin's song "Remember When The Music" and recalled Chapin's persistence and commitment to enlisting other artists like Springsteen in the fight against hunger. (Ayres and Marsh spoke at the '87 event, as well.) You can watch that performance in the archival video embedded below:
Behind the scenes, however, it was Bill Ayres' strong connections to Bruce Springsteen and some of his key associates that played just as important a role as Harry Chapin's in connecting Springsteen to the anti-hunger struggle. In the mid-1970s, Ayres became the first person to interview Springsteen for a nationally broadcasted radio program. The program was called On This Rock. It combined rock music with features and interviews that explored issues of faith, compassion, and justice. Since Ayres was a music fan who also served a thirteen-year stint as a Roman Catholic priest, he was highly qualified to host such a program. After Springsteen recorded his first lengthy On This Rock interview with Ayres in late 1974 (though the recorded interview didn't actually air until mid-April of 1975,) he returned to the national airwaves with Ayres for a followup interview - this time broadcasted live - in mid-June of 1976.
During this period, Ayres also had become friends with Dave Marsh and his wife-to-be, Barbara Carr, who not much later would become Bruce Springsteen's co-manager for more than four decades. The Ayres-Carr-Marsh friendship became a long and strong one, as well. When Carr and Marsh married in 1979, it was Bill Ayres - drawing once more upon his previous clerical background - who performed a special blessing of their nuptials. More than three decades later, when Barbara and Dave welcomed and celebrated with family and friends the birth of their grandchild, Bill Ayres performed a special blessing for that joyous occasion, too.
In 1998, Ayres collaborated with another old friend, fellow radio personality, and longtime WhyHunger board-member Pete Fornatale on a unique self-help book entitled All You Need Is Love... and 99 Other Life Lessons From Classic Rock Songs. For each of the one-hundred songs analyzed in the book - six of them written by Bruce Springsteen - Ayres and Fornatale provided some background, a reflection on the meaning and wisdom to be found in the song, and some suggested actions that one could take in response to what was found there.
In the book's acknowledgments section, Bill Ayres wrote, "I would also like to thank Harry Chapin and Bruce Springsteen, who have shown the world that rock 'n' roll is so much more than self-indulgent, self-important, and self-destructive behavior. Their music and their generosity have been lifegiving to me and to generations of ardent music fans and social activists."
And in the book's foreword, Dave Marsh wrote, "What this book does is amplify what we already know or, at least, what we already suspect; it pulls out of some of the most important songs their most helpful and frightful implications. It is in the tradition of books of 'affirmations,' and the first thing that it affirms is that such deep content exists. Since the attacks on our popular music as shallow and meaningless, harmful rather than healing, have been unrelenting since its inception in the 1950s, this is a singularly important achievement. It's hard for me to imagine any lover of that music, or any of its offshoots, who doesn't know that this material is embedded in the music...
"Certainly, for everyone to whom rock and soul and funk and folk and rap and punk and all the other offshoots of the original whole and holy amalgam of blues, country, and gospel has had continuing appeal, it is this ability to touch what most needs touching that keeps us coming back.
"The information in All You Need Is Love gains its importance because it's useful; it's a way of knowing more about the song, and more about its inner spirit. Additionally, the text provides a way of doing something about the needs the songs address."
That part about "doing something," in the last quoted sentence above, is what brings us full-circle back to what so strongly connected Bill Ayres to Dave Marsh... and to Harry Chapin and Bruce Springsteen, too, for that matter. While we now must face having lost Bill's and Dave's physical presences among us here in the land of the living, each of these two old friends also has left us with an enormous, inspirational legacy to which we can continue to turn, if and whenever we also choose to carry on their various efforts to utilize music in fighting against hunger, poverty, and other injustices. It's their way of, as Bruce Springsteen wrote and sang in his great song "We Are Alive," continuing to stand with us "shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart."
And so in the same spirit of what Bruce said while performing "Remember When The Music" for the memory of Harry Chapin back in '87, as we now mourn having lost both Bill Ayres and Dave Marsh in one very tough August indeed, let's still remember to continue doing something... and may their songs be sung.
-special thanks to Barbara Carr
