On the night of January 30, 1985, directly after the American Music Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, all of the biggest pop stars in America (minus a couple notable names) converged at A&M Studios to participate in the biggest joint recording in pop music history: "We Are the World," a charity single for African famine relief. The tune, penned mainly by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, featured 21 soloists and a massive chorus, among whom were the likes of Richie and Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Ray Charles, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, and many others. It was a massive undertaking, to say the least, and while much of the legwork of assembling the musicians and organizing the recording fell to manager Ken Kragen, the project was the brainchild of Harry Belafonte.

Belafonte had seen the same BBC report on the famine that had inspired Bob Geldof to organize the British charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas," and he had called Kragen with the idea to organize a charity concert. In Kragen's estimation, this was not feasible — but he thought, perhaps, that they could pull off a song, and indeed they did. Belafonte was present at the recording of the tune that would go on to sell an estimated 20 million copies to become the best-selling physical single of all time at that point and raise millions of dollars to feed the hungry in Africa — and at the recording's conclusion, a room full of megastars broke into a chorus of "Day-O" in tribute.

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