And They All Sang

Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey

Studs Terkel

With a new foreword by Anthony DeCurtis

paperback

$16.95

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Studs Terkel hosted a legendary daily radio show in Chicago, presenting listeners with his inimitable take on an eclectic range of music, from classical, opera, and jazz to gospel, blues, folk, and rock. And They All Sang is nothing less than “a tribute to music’s universality and power” (Philadelphia Inquirer), featuring more than forty of Terkel’s unforgettable conversations with some of the greatest musicians of the past century—including Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein, Big Bill Broonzy, Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Rosa Raisa, Pete Seeger, and many others.

As the esteemed music critic Anthony DeCurtis wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “the terms ‘interview’ or ‘oral history’ don’t begin to do justice to what Terkel achieves in these conversations, which are at once wildly ambitious and as casual as can be.” Whether discussing Enrico Caruso’s nervousness on stage with opera diva Edith Mason or the Beatles’ 1966 encounter in London with revered Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, “Terkel’s singular gift for bringing his subjects to life in their own words should strike a chord with any music fan old enough to have replaced a worn-out record needle” (New York Times).

Studs Terkel is the author of twelve books of oral history, including Working and the Pulitzer Prize–winning “The Good War”. A member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. He lives in Chicago.