Marvin gaye abraham martin john

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Instead, Gaye’s recording – for many, the definitive one – would become a hit in the UK charts.

Since then, everyone from Bob Dylan to Ray Charles to Whitney Houston has covered the song. (Both men were, however, followed by Presidents named Johnson.)

Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, having campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans for a number of years, and most famously giving his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in Washington in 1963.

Once again, the good had died young. In June 1968, the Democratic presidential nominee Robert Kennedy – JFK’s younger brother – was assassinated by the Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly because Kennedy had supported Israel in the Six-Day War the year before. Kennedy was also known for his championing of poorer Americans, including African Americans.

It was this event which inspired Holler to pen ‘Abraham, Martin and John’, but he didn’t record the song himself, and it was the American singer Dion who first released a version of the track, in August of that year.

A Widely-Covered Song

Then, in 1969, cover versions by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and, improbably, the veteran stand-up comedian Moms Mabley also hit the US charts: it was Smokey, rather than Marvin, who became the first Motown artist to release a version of Holler’s folk-pop track.

‘Abraham, Martin and John’ is one such song.

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Categories UncategorizedTags Marvin Gaye

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The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges once quipped of the Gothic novel Vathek, ‘the original is unfaithful to the translation’.

Who are Abraham, Martin and John, and who is the missing name from this trio?

Abraham, Martin, John – and Robert

The song’s title refers to three great champions of what became known as ‘civil rights’: Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68), and John F. Kennedy (1917-63).

Lincoln, as the political figure who led the abolitionist cause in the American Civil War (1861-65), did indeed free a lot of people, with slavery being abolished in the United States in 1865.

He was the first of four US Presidents to be assassinated, with John F. Kennedy, in 1963, becoming the fourth – although he was shot in a Ford car rather than the Ford theatre. (This eloquent speech, which King only finished writing on the morning he delivered it, should not be confused with the Abba song.)

Structurally, the song is straightforward and each of the four successive verses is essentially the same, with only the given names of the people honoured (Abraham, John, Martin, and Bobby) changing.

The one exception is the fourth verse, which asks (rhetorically) us didn’t these men all stand for something and love those things they stood for?

You know you’ve written a belter when Dylan wants to record your track (Holler was, by all accounts, delighted), although perhaps the Leonard Nimoy rendition is one for completists only.

In many ways, we can track the emergence of Gaye’s growing social conscience in his music with ‘Abraham, Martin and John’. But who is (or was) Bobby?

Who’s Bobby?

The American songwriter Dick Holler is now best-remembered for writing ‘Abraham, Martin and John’.

It’s like that with some cover versions: they become regarded as the definitive recordings of a song to the extent that they ‘become’ the original. A couple of years later, his album What’s Going On?, a sort of ‘concept album’ dealing with contemporary issues ranging from environmental concerns to the Vietnam war, would become his most critically successful record.

Tragically, thirteen years later, on 1 April 1984, Gaye would be shot and killed by his father, following an argument.

They sought the good in the world and, through standing by their principles, they set other people free – even though, in every case, it cost them their lives.

But it was the fourth assassinated man, whose name was left out of the title, whose death would inspire the writing of the song in the first place. But before we get to the song’s curious recording history, perhaps we should pin down the song’s meaning.