And They All Sang | Granta

  • Published: 02/07/2007
  • ISBN: 9781862079366
  • 135x30mm
  • 302 pages

And They All Sang

Studs Terkel, Studs Terkel

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel hosted a legendary daily radio programme in Chicago, presenting listeners with his singular take on an eclectic range of music from classical, opera and jazz to gospel, blues, folk and rock. And They All Sang features more than forty of Terkel’s inimitable conversations from the programme with some of the greatest musicians of that period. Among the many highlights: a twenty-two-year-old Bob Dylan tells how he came to write ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’; Janis Joplin, in a rare interview, recalls her teenage years in Texas spent listening to old Leadbelly and Bessie Smith records; Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie talk about their sense of kinship with fellow jazz geniuses Joe Oliver and Charlie Parker. Perhaps the biggest revelation, though, is Terkel himself, whose brilliant insights throughout reflect his profound understanding and appreciation of the affinities between all forms of music.

This is vintage Terkel - interviewing forty of the greatest and most deeply human musical figures of our time

Oliver Sacks

Terkel is the master of that rarest of skills: listening ... he asks the right people the right questions

Observer

Terkel could probably tease interesting life stories from a lamppost

Time Out

The Author

Studs Terkel was born in Chicago in 1912. He is the author of many books of oral history, including Will The Circle Be Unbroken? and Hope Dies Last, both published by Granta Books. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Good War” in 1985, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2004. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2008.

More about the author →

The Author

Studs Terkel was born in Chicago in 1912. He is the author of many books of oral history, including Will The Circle Be Unbroken? and Hope Dies Last, both published by Granta Books. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Good War” in 1985, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2004. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2008.

More about the author →