The Real People Behind ‘Abraham, Martin and John’

By Oliver Tearle

A song about three assassinated men, ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ was first recorded by Marvin Gaye. Actually, almost none of that previous sentence is true, except, perhaps, for the word ‘song’.

‘Abraham, Martin and John’ is, in reality, about four famous men who were all assassinated. And although the song is most famous for the version recorded by the Motown singer Marvin Gaye in 1969, it was written by Dick Holler and first recorded by Dion.

Indeed, Marvin Gaye wasn’t even the first Motown artist to record the song in 1969. But before we get to the song’s curious recording history, perhaps we should pin down the song’s meaning. 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. In 1863, as the sitting US President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all enslaved people in the rebellious states to be free.

Famously, as the President sat watching a play in the Ford theatre in Washington one night in 1865, a failed actor named John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Lincoln. 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. (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. (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? 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 who is (or was) Bobby?

Who’s Bobby?

The American songwriter Dick Holler is now best-remembered for writing ‘Abraham, Martin and John’. 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. 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. 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’. 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. He was aged just 44. Once again, the good had died young. Although he didn’t write the track himself, ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ belongs to Gaye more than to any other artist who has recorded it, and the Dion version sounds like a cover of the Gaye original, rather than the other way around.

The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges once quipped of the Gothic novel Vathek, ‘the original is unfaithful to the translation’. 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. ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ is one such song.