Marvin gaye martin abraham and john

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Indeed, Marvin Gaye wasn’t even the first Motown artist to record the song in 1969.

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. Like the others, he also advocated for change and met a similar fate. His relentless pursuit of equality, only to meet a tragic end, reiterates the song’s theme.

Finally, the mention of “my old friend Bobby” refers to Bobby Kennedy, John F.

Kennedy’s younger brother. But before we get to the song’s curious recording history, perhaps we should pin down the song’s meaning. 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.

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.

(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?

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. 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.

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.

The assassinations of influential figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy deeply impacted the collective psyche of the nation, leaving many in search of solace and understanding.