Lots of attention paid this week to the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death (Thurs., June 6th), which came just two months after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, both events occurring as the war in Viet Nam was escalating—CNN dubbed it “the most turbulent time in American history.”
This was the world that the first wave of Boomers (born 1946) were entering, as they graduated, en masse, from college.
The nation’s soul needed soothing and Dion lent the perfect amount of emotion in “Abraham, Martin, and John”, a soliloquy written by songwriter Dick Holler, that became a hit and that helped calm a nation that was reeling from one calamity to the next.
(BTW, photojournalist Harry Benson’s picture book, “RFK”, came out last month.)
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We would be remiss to not mention that yesterday (June 7th) would have been Prince’s 60th birthday. To mark the occasion, there will be a weekend event in Henderson, Minn, about 50 miles from the Twin Cities, where most of “Purple Rain” was filmed.