Charles Bethea is a writer based in Atlanta. He contributes regularly to the New Yorker, the New Republic and Outside.

Peggy Seeger, half sister to folk music icon Pete Seeger, likes the way Bernie Sanders voices his message. She just doesn’t like it when he sings it. Recently, for the first time, Peggy listened to We Shall Overcome, the folk album Sanders recorded in 1987, six years into his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. In his one-off dalliance with the recording industry, the then-46 year-old mayor covers—in a general, if not musical, sense—five of Pete Seeger’s best-known standards, including “This Land Is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” Recorded by the now defunct BurlingTown Recordings label, at a studio where the jam band Phish had once made music, the album came to light last September, when the Vermont alternative weekly Seven Days discovered it during an archival search. The paper’s resulting story praised “the heights to which [Sanders’] guttural, Brooklyn-strained-through-a-wood-chipper accent elevated the classic ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

That’s being generous. Todd Lockwood, the Vermont musician who came up with the idea for the album, told Seven Days: “As talented of a guy as [Sanders] is, he has absolutely not one musical bone in his body, and that became painfully obvious from the get-go.” Fortunately, Sanders—who surprised Lockwood by agreeing to do the album in the first place—had a few dozen professional backup singers. The resulting album sold a couple hundred cassette tapes, but didn’t reach many ears outside of Vermont. Certainly not Peggy Seeger’s.


Like her famous older brother, who passed away last year at 94, Peggy Seeger is a folk musician: “We take up the flag on behalf of those who don’t have voices. That’s what Pete did, that’s what I do.” She has lived and performed in England for most of her life, except for her first 2½ decades, spent in New York, and a recent stint in Asheville, North Carolina, from 1994-2010.

Now 80 years old and residing in Oxford, England, she keeps up with the dramatic arc of American politics and its actors: “Bernie Sanders is smashing,” she says. “America needs more Bernies to rattle the cages of the bigwigs in all parties. It would be lovely if he were president. But that album he made,” she pauses to gather her thoughts. “I wouldn’t call it a folk singing album, because he didn’t sing. He’s just speaking to music. It’s natural, I suppose, that a left-wing politician would have done something like that in his more radical early years. And his conviction is good. But his delivery simply is not: He’s trying to talk at the same pace as the music, and it’s not terribly artistic. Conviction isn’t enough for an audience when you’re on stage. These songs, reading the words to an accompaniment, aren’t going to convince the electorate. I certainly wouldn’t use them for campaigning.”

And what would her brother have thought? “Pete would have been happy that Bernie seriously took up his songs. He admired Bernie tremendously. But he would have said that Bernie was just reading poetry to a background of music. And not doing it terribly well.”

Shocking as it may sound to American liberals, Peggy Seeger, whose American passport was temporarily taken away in her twenties after a visit to communist China, may be further to the left than Sanders. “Let’s face it,” she says, “‘We Shall Overcome’ could have been sung by the soldiers going into Vietnam. You just have to change a few of the words. But I also realize that it’s very, very singable. All of those songs of Pete’s that Bernie recorded—‘Oh Freedom,’ ‘The Banks of Marble’—are very singable. That’s the power of them.”

Though much of her recent work has concerned women’s issues, Seeger has written songs about politicians that she supports—“I’ve done it all my life, I think it’s a wonderful thing to do”—including one for President Obama, in 2009, called “Obama Is The One For Me.” (“I still think he’s better than John McCain,” she says, “no matter what’s happened.”) Less well known is her work warning against the candidacy of Sarah Palin and McCain, to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. “Sarah's Hard Rock Candy” begins: “Johnny needs a running mate, his campaign is failing / Let’s get someone no one’s heard of, hello Sarah Palin! / John’s a weary weather vane, Sarah’s hard rock candy / If they win they’ll stop the clock, keep your passport handy!”

In order to win in a general election, Seeger—who readily admits that she’s not a campaign manager—believes that Sanders should “lasso some folk singers” to write songs about him. “I’m too busy this time around,” she says. “But he could try getting Charlie King, I bet he’d do it. Or Dave Lippman. And that crazy duo out in Madison, Wisconsin, Lou and Peter Berryman: They’d write a song for Bernie! So would Tom Paxton. There are plenty who’d come out to support Bernie. Even Bob Dylan, if you could get him off his bum. You’d just have to get past the army of Cerberuses blocking his front door.”

Seizing the political moment, Lockwood released the Sanders folk album on iTunes last December at a price point that even young socialists in maple sugar shacks can afford: $4.95. Thirteen reviews, averaging four stars, have been more forgiving than Peggy Seeger’s commentary. One describes the sonic experience this way: “There are very few things that are as glorious as this album. Bernie has brought both the Democratic Party and the song ‘This Land is Your Land’ to new heights.” That's certainly one way to put it.

