Bernie Sanders Released a Spoken Word Album in 1987 and Frankly It Rules
“Can Bernie Sanders sing? No, he can’t,” writes Eusebius, the top-rated Amazon reviewer of We Shall Overcome, Bernie Sanders’ first an only spoken-word music album. “I wanted to have a chuckle at his expense, but I stayed and listened with deep admiration.” Eusebius, I agree.
Dangerous Minds notes the existence of Bernie’s 1987 opus, samples of which can be heard below. We Shall Overcome was recorded with the assistance of a Burlington-based musician named Todd Lockwood back when Sanders was the mayor of that city, and finds the progressive it-boy doing William Shatner-style orations of classic folk tunes like “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” and “This Land Is Your Land.”
“As talented of a guy as he is, he has absolutely not one musical bone in his body, and that became painfully obvious from the get-go,” Lockwood told the Vermont-based newspaper Seven Days last year. “This is a guy who couldn’t even tap his foot to music coming over the radio. No sense of melody. No sense of rhythm — the rhythm part surprised me, because he has good rhythm when he’s delivering a speech in public.”
If that endorsement doesn’t convince you to head over to Amazon and buy the thing, I don’t know what will!
