Two pandemic victims: Singer/songwriter John Prine and the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders
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By Dave Lindorff
Two hugely important people were taken down by COVID-19 this past week. Both have left a legacy, the importance of which cannot be ignored.
John Prine
The first struck down last week is one of the greatest modern songwriters of my lifetime, John Prine. One of my favorite musicians, Prine was a humble, funny and extremely deep and sometimes powerfully political folk musician who had the remarkable ability to infuse his songs with all those characteristics at the same time. He had an ability to could sing about the human condition and about political reality with the same conversational ease, and even to get you to laugh through tears at tragedy.
Prine died of complications from the Coronavirus at 73, an age that was far too young for life to be over, but that was old enough to make him especially vulnerable to COVID-19, even without his also having lungs that were damaged by years of smoking and by a lung cancer and neck cancer both of which he had managed to beat.
Prine will live on through an astonishingly huge trove of songs he wrote and performed himself, which will surely be covered, as most have been already, by hundreds and thousands of musicians, famous and amateur, for decades and generations to come.
Here is a playable list of just 25 of them performed by Prine himself.
Bernie Sanders
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