Dion DiMucci was born July 18, 1939 in the Bronx, New York, United States. He was a singer and songwriter whose career began in popular music in the 50s with his group known as Dion & the Belmonts. 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. 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 clean ever since except for a brief period in the mid-1970s) he switched to protest songs in the late 1960s; his best-known song as a soloist, "Abraham, Martin & John", was a response to the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. He continued to record protest songs into the 1970s.

His Born To Be With You album, produced by Phil Spector and released in 1973, was a commercial disaster, but has been cited by Jason Pierce of Spiritualized as a major influence on Spiritualized's work.

In the late 1970s, Dion recorded albums in the contemporary Christian music vein. In the 1980s and 1990s, he returned to secular pop music.