KK: It was a terrible time for everybody.

TB: I was 100 percent behind him and couldn’t wait for him to become president, because I was certain he would straighten the whole thing out. He stood for all the right things.

My personal feeling then and to this day is that there’s too much violence in America. You can just walk in a store and say, “I want to buy a gun,” and they just give it to you. It doesn’t make sense. There should be control of guns. Your father stood up for that. I’ve seen a speech he gave in Oregon just a few weeks before he was shot. He talked about how we had to stop the easy access to guns.

KK: His aides told him not to raise the issue because there were so many hunters in the audience, and he was heckled when he spoke about the need for gun control, five years after Uncle Jack was killed. Then, in 2015, the very same town, Roseburg, Oregon, suffered from a mass shooting in which 16 people were shot, and eight died. There have been so many mass shootings in our country since then, it’s hard to keep track of them all.

TB: I’ve seen so much violence in my life. I grew up in New York City, in Queens. I’m Italian, but we had every nationality there. It was a great American city, a real melting pot.

My father was sick for a long time, and then he died when I was ten years old. My mom was unbelievable. She had to raise three children and she worked so hard. I’ll never forget one dramatic moment when she actually went to Grand Central and confronted a bunch of businessmen who were on a stage there for some kind of ceremony. She went right up to the stage and said, “Who’s going to feed my children?”

That stayed with me my whole life. She was so good, you know. She had to work hard her whole life to make sure her children had what they needed.

She was a seamstress. She worked day and night, and she never settled for anything. The most important thing to her was the quality of her work. We were completely poor, but she’d take a dress she was working on and throw it over her shoulders and say, “Don’t have me work on a bad dress.” I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the greatest lesson I’d ever learn. When I started my recording career, I said, “I’m never going to make a bad record just for money.” So I had a fight on my hands. The record company said, “What are you doing? We want you to record this stupid song.” I said, “I don’t do stupid songs. If a song is intelligent, and if it’s well written, then I’ll sing it.” And they said, “But you’re not going to make money that way.” I said, “I think I’m going to make a lot of money, because the records will be timeless. They’ll never be old-fashioned, they’ll never be forgotten.”

My father was a beautiful man. He’d take me out on a sunny summer Saturday, and he’d tell me, “Look at how beautiful life is.” He’d take me to Astoria Park, where I could look across the river at Manhattan and dream of being famous in New York City one day.

My older brother was a great singer. He was on the radio, and everybody loved him, but he didn’t want to do it. I said to him, “We need you to make it. We’re so poor.” He just didn’t want to, so I said, “I’m going to sing.” My father used to love to sing in Italy. He was my inspiration. So to this day, I’m still singing.

I went into the army when I was a teenager. It was toward the end of World War II. It was tough in the army. There was a lot of ignorance. People were different—from different parts of the country. If you’re a Northerner and they’re from the South… they don’t like the Northerners, you know.

If you’re Italian, you’re different. Anybody’s who’s not Italian doesn’t like Italians. It was like that. They were against the Jews. There was a lot of prejudice going on. It was tough in the army, and that wasn’t even the war.

Near the end of the war I was in the Battle of the Bulge. I was in the infantry, but I never killed anybody. I wouldn’t dare. I couldn’t. My upbringing didn’t allow it. I would never kill anybody. I was trained in boot camp, so I would kind of put up with it, but I was never going to kill somebody.

I got a lot of heat for that philosophy. I would be asked, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Well I was drafted, so I’m here, but I’m against war.” I’m still against war. I think it’s a terrible situation internationally, but I’m just against war.

We won the battle, and then we walked into a concentration camp. We freed Jews in Germany. We freed them. That was unbelievable. It’s crazy, you know—someone’s criticized for their religion. I’m not a religious person, but I know what’s right. Hating people for their religion, or just for being a certain nationality, that’s wrong. That’s why we were fighting. We wanted to make sure everybody was treated like human beings. We freed them from that camp, and it felt very good to do that.

It’s a different world now. I believed so much in what your dad was talking about, all the things he was saying about treating everybody right, and I believed he was going to be the best president that we ever had. Everything he said he was going to do, I said, “We’re finally going to get somebody in there who would get us to where America is supposed to be.” I couldn’t believe it when he was assassinated, and I never quite got over it, even to this day. I lost hope. It’s not the same for me.

KK: You marched in Selma with Martin Luther King…

TB: Right, it all came about—there was a march in Selma, and there was a lot of violence, and some people died. So they were going to have a second march but they had to cancel it because they were worried about more violence. Then I got a call. It was from Harry Belafonte, and he asked me to come to Selma. I’d never had a call from anyone who was so famous—and he was my age—and I said, “I just don’t want to fight.” I had those experiences in the war, and I’d seen how terrible it was, and I didn’t want to pick up any kind of a weapon ever again. He explained to me about nonviolence and how they were conducting the demonstrations, and he talked about what they were doing to black people in the South. I knew what that was like; I had seen those things in my own life, so I said, “I’ll go.”

One night during the march, Martin Luther King asked myself and the other artists to perform for all the marchers. There was no place to perform, so someone had a connection to a funeral home so they brought in a bunch of empty caskets. They placed them on the ground for a stage, and we just improvised the whole thing. We just entertained whoever wanted to listen. I sang “Just in Time.” It was quite an experience, you know, but then I had to leave. I couldn’t go on the whole march because I had an engagement in Las Vegas.

The woman who drove me to the airport was from Detroit, her name was Viola Liuzzo. She had seen the first Selma march on television, when they beat so many people—known as Bloody Sunday. She had told her husband she wanted to go to Selma and help. She had quite a few children back in Detroit—five, I think. She was assassinated by four Klansmen driving back from Montgomery to Selma right after she took me to the airport, for doing that, for driving me and other people back and forth at the Selma march. I couldn’t believe it.

She was a wonderful woman. And they killed her. The ignorance of that is unbelievable. Regretfully we still have hatred and violence in this world and I hope that one day we will realize that it has to stop.

I’ve always been a pacifist, my whole life. What I’ve seen, in the war and in the South for civil rights, has only made me stronger in my beliefs about this. You know, they asked me to sing the national anthem on many occasions but I prefer “America the Beautiful.” It celebrates the natural beauty and promise of this great country.

KK: So you’ve never sung “The Star-Spangled Banner”?

TB: I like to sing “America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America.”

KK: You know, my father said if he became president, he’d make “This Land Is Your Land” our national anthem.

TB: That’s a good song too!

I’m an international artist. I play everywhere. Every country is great, but our country has every nationality, every religion; there’s no country like it in the world. It’s wonderful. It’s a great country. We have all philosophies of the world right here in America. So if this country doesn’t get together, the world’s not going to get together. Every nationality is here. So it’s really the best country, and I’m not just waving a flag here. We represent the chance of eliminating bigotry, even though we haven’t done it yet. Some people don’t get that, and maybe they never will, but your father got it, and he stood for that.

When I perform for an audience, it’s like a command performance for me. My attitude is they’re all kings and queens in the audience. They’re above me, the audience. I don’t look down on them. I look up to them. I respect the public. There are too many people who disrespect the public. They don’t get it.

When I’m performing, the audience sees that I respect them. I know how to sing, but that’s not enough; that’s only part of what people respond to. They sense that I love them and they love me back. And all of a sudden they’re cheering me, you know, and it’s because they see I’m not a prejudiced person. The music tells them that, and they can feel the love through the respect I have for every individual.