And They All Sang

'This is vintage Terkel - interviewing forty of the greatest and most deeply human musical figures of our time' Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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.