Jackson Song to Aid 9/11 Victims

Michael Jackson is coordinating another star-studded fundraising effort around a new song to raise money for the survivors and families of victims of last week's terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

Sixteen years after helping to organize the USA for Africa effort with the song "We Are the World," Jackson has recruited Destiny's Child, 'N Sync's Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys' Nick Carter and Mya to record "What More Can I Give," which he hopes will raise more than $50 million.

"I'm not one to sit back and point the finger and say, 'Oh, I feel bad for what happened to them,'" Jackson told Rolling Stone. "I want to do something, to give to help those who lost their parents, who lost their mothers and their fathers. Those are our people. Those are our children. Those are our parents."

Jackson says that he hopes to have individual artists take on the verses with all the guests singing together on the chorus. "I want the whole world to sing it, to bring us together as a world," he says. "Because a song is a mantra, something you repeat over and over. And we need peace, we need giving, we need love, we need unity."

Jackson debuted the song two years ago as part of a pair of "Michael Jackson and Friends" concerts that benefited the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, the Red Cross and Unesco. Jackson hopes to enlist additional stars to perform the song and plans to record and release it as soon as possible.

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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