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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. We uncover the layers and sentiments behind this touching track.

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“Abraham, Martin and John” Lyrics Meaning

Starting with the opening line, “Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham,” Gaye sets the stage by referencing Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S.

president known for his role in ending slavery. 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.

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. 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.

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’. 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’.

(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. Each one was assassinated in their pursuit of a better world. Once again, the good had died young. The recurring phrase, “I just looked around, and he was gone,” reinforces the abruptness of their departures, emphasizing how these figures’ sudden absences left a void.

It was within this backdrop that “Abraham, Martin and John” was penned by Dick Holler in 1968.

Holler was deeply affected by the assassinations that seemed to happen quickly. 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.