WEEK ONE: ‘Abraham, Martin, and John’ (1968) submitted by John Campbell
For my 60s song, I select “Abraham, Martin, and John” by Dion recorded in 1968. Although Fleetwood Mac and The Beatles are among my first musical memories, I listened to a lot of “oldies” (meaning 50s and early 60s) music in my tweens and early teens. “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer” were two Dion hits that got a lot of air time on DC’s WXTR (XTRA 104.1 FM) – these were simple, early 60s songs about teenage “players” as they would now be called. It was another Dion song, though, that made an impression. By the summer of 1968 – a year that started with the Tet Offensive– the violence of the 60s had clearly affected everyone, even Dion. The feeling of loss was unavoidable. Dion, that simple sock-hopper of the 1950s, released the song “Abraham, Martin and John” in August of 1968 after the assassinations of MLK and RFK in April and June. The song has a tone of resignation and is melodramatic at times, like with its melodious harp and church organ riffs. It strains for calm, as it plays up the “didn’t you love the things they stood for?” and downplays the violence. Instead of the soul-searching why, it asks the easy question “can you tell me where he’s gone?” … and then provides the easy answer in the final two lines. The song is soft, even maudlin — “it seems the good they die young” is a far cry from The Who’s “Hope I die before I get old” (1965) or Weinberg’s “Never trust anyone over 30” (1964). The innocent, even somewhat clueless, “I just looked around and he’s gone” isn’t at all like the exuberant sarcasm of Country Joe’s “Whoopee! We’re all going die!” in his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock (1969). The song to me is the product of someone embedded in the 1950s – it is a song after all that at its essence deifies authority figures – who is trying to make sense of the 1960s. For me, a boy of 12, it was a gentle, simplistic, quasi-religious gateway into a rough, complex, and iconoclastic decade. As an adult, I hear mostly a desperate nostalgia in the angelic harp strings.
Marvin Gaye does this song better, but that’s a whole other story and another decade…
The Global 1960s 