Dion DiMucci, better known as Dion, is an American singer-songwriter born July 18, 1939, in the Bronx borough of New York City. His career in popular music began in the 1950s with his group Dion & the Belmonts (named after his northern Bronx neighborhood, Belmont). He went solo in the early 1960s and continued to have hits with songs like "Runaround Sue", "The Wanderer" and "Ruby Baby" until 1964, when changing public tastes and heroin addiction caused him to enter a commercial decline. Nevertheless Dion, along with Bob Dylan, was the only pop artist to be featured on the album cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).During the mid-1960s, he struggled with his addictions and recorded songs in a folk-rock vein. After getting clean from drug use (he has remained so ever since, except for a brief period in the mid-1970s), he switched to protest songs in the late 1960s. Perhaps his best-known song as a soloist, "Abraham, Martin & John" (1968), was a response to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy during the summer of 1968. Dion continued to record protest songs into the 1970s.
