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 the past century. 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. Terkel offers us a remarkable collective portrait of the full spectrum of musical genres.
