Pat Boone to Newsmax TV: Song With Rodney King's Message Resonating Now

Legendary music icon Pat Boone is gaining a whole new audience of music lovers on Facebook and YouTube with a song, "Can't We Get Along," which he wrote after the Rodney King riots in 1991.

The words still resonate with the protests that are taking place nationwide in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this year, he told Newsmax TV on Monday.

"It was 1991 when Rodney King was badly beaten by the police," Boone told "The Chris Salcedo Show." "He was resisting arrest; he admitted that. But they beat him almost to death, and then, of course, that was on television. That sparked the L.A. riots . . . the L.A. riots were really about the kind of thing that's been happening all over the country now."

King's words, "can't we all get along," have since become part of modern culture, but Boone told Salcedo: "I cried when I heard him say that."

Instead of saying something inflammatory that could have sparked more rioting, Boone said, King was "calling for understanding and communication."

"I said that's what we need," Boone said. "I wrote the song then, but I didn't have a way to market it, and I sang it with Black choruses around a lake and doing what I could, and then the song just laid around for 30 years until about three weeks ago."

Then, Boone said, it hit him the song "should be the anthem of where we are now; can't we get along? Can't we work it out? Can't we be friends? And America, the name still stands for freedom, with liberty the same for you and me." 

A gospel singer, Wendy Moten, sings the song, not Boone, and it plays along with scenes from news footage from cities all America showing police and protesters doing what the song calls for, said Boone, embracing and comforting each other.

And the song Boone wrote 30 years ago is now a hit on his Facebook page, where the video for the song has reached about 2 million views.

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