Shapiro: You’ve just come out with a new book called And They All Sang.

Terkel: That was a phrase of [conductor] Leonard Bernstein’s. The subtitle tells what it’s about: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey — “eclectic,” of course, being the operative word. How it began: I went to the University of Chicago Law School, and it wasn’t for me. I went there dreaming of Clarence Darrow, and I woke up to Antonin Scalia. He [Scalia] taught there, by the way — not when I was there, of course: I graduated in 1934. Anyway, law school wasn’t for me. Corporations and such. So I was a rotten student. My parents ran a men’s hotel near the North Side on Wells and Grand, and I rode the streetcar to law school. There was a stopover where I changed streetcars in Bronzeville, which was a black community in the thirties. It was, of course, segregated, but, oh, there was a life there then that isn’t there now. I heard records in shops. They were called “race records,” on labels such as Okeh, Vocalion, Bluebird. And there I heard the blues singers: Big Bill Broonzy (my favorite), Memphis Slim, Memphis Minnie, and Tampa Red. So going to the University of Chicago Law School helped me get acquainted with the blues.

And then I graduated and got a job with the wpa [Works Progress Administration]. The wpa did what free enterprise couldn’t do. The free market fell on its ass in the big stock-market crash of October 1929. People didn’t know what had hit them. The wise men of Wall Street were going crazy. The wpa provided jobs for millions who were unemployed. And now they’re talking about privatizing everything! Privatizing is what killed us then. It was all privatized. We were saved by the government. There is no memory of this. We are suffering from a national Alzheimer’s disease. And this didn’t begin with Bush. Bush is the cartoon spirit; he’s a caricature. It began with Ronald Reagan.

Through that job with the wpa I met this guy who had a workers’ theater company called the Chicago Repertory Group. So I became an actor. We did Waiting for Lefty. Then the director told me there was work in radio soap operas. They were all the same script, and all had the same crooks: the bright one, the middle one, and the dumb one. I was always the dumb one. It was steady work.

Some producer liked my style, and I became a commentator on the air. Then I was in the war, but only for nine months stateside: I had a perforated eardrum. I wanted to join the Red Cross, but they wouldn’t let me in. I found out later on that the fbi had a dossier on me because of this repertory-group stuff, and because I was making speeches for the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. This was just after the Spanish Civil War. I was outspoken at rallies, especially for civil rights. Remember that [fbi director] J. Edgar Hoover was as close to a thug as you could get.

I applied for a job at the fbi, a civil-service job: fingerprint classifier. I almost worked for the fbi. When the fbi asked for references, one of my law professors at the University of Chicago said, “Sloppy, slovenly, low-class Jew.” So Hoover’s response was “Take Louis Terkel off the payroll. He’s not our type of boy.” I like that. There could be a little chapter in my memoir called “I Was Almost an fbi Man.”

For the rest of the war I got a civil-service job with the Treasury Department counting “baby bonds.” In 1932 World War I vets had gone to Washington because they hadn’t gotten their bonuses, and they were tear-gassed by General Douglas MacArthur. The commissioner of police had said that under no circumstances would he drive out his old war buddies, but MacArthur did it. MacArthur’s two aides in doing it were [future president] Dwight D. Eisenhower and [future general] George S. Patton; isn’t that interesting? So then Franklin D. Roosevelt got in the White House, and the veterans got their bonuses, of course. And the New Deal Congress decided they deserved more than that, so they were getting “baby bonuses.”

That’s the job I got: to count baby bonuses. I went nuts doing it, so I came back to Chicago.

[Jazz singer] Billie Holiday sang at my farewell party — she was a friend of a friend of someone who was in the repertory group. And I remember she was beautiful, with this gardenia in her hair, and she asked me [puts on Holiday’s voice], “What would you like to hear, baby?” Well, “Strange Fruit,” of course, but also “Fine and Mellow.” That was her theme. And she sang it. They had that in my fbi dossier.

Then I got a job as a disc jockey. I was playing records, and you could do anything you wanted then. I played [Italian tenor] Enrico Caruso. I’d loved Caruso as a kid. My father would buy one-sided Caruso records for two bucks a head — that’s like fifty bucks today. John Ciardi, the Italian American poet, said Caruso was about the potential in the human race. A singer could hit a certain note — that’s as far as you could go — but Caruso would go beyond that. It told us that human beings have possibilities, that all of us are better than we may be behaving at the moment.

Classical music is considered music for the upper classes. There is a guy in a wonderful oral history called Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe. And this guy is a working man — a very literate working man, but the classical symphonies are not for him. They’re a little beyond him. Then one day he’s caught in a torrential rain, so he rushes into this building, and it’s the lobby of a symphony hall. He hears music from inside and opens the door slightly, and it’s Mozart, and he’s transformed. That’s what Mozart had in mind; that’s what Brahms had in mind; that’s certainly what Bach had in mind. They wrote for the great many, not for the few.

So I’d put on a Caruso aria — say, “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s Xerxes. Then came Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” my favorite jazz record. I followed that with Woody Guthrie doing “Tom Joad,” a Dust Bowl ballad. Then a Brazilian soprano, and maybe a country song.

Shapiro: You could never do that today on a mainstream radio station. Every station has its own format, whether it’s rock, country . . .

Terkel: That’s right. So I played everything. I’m known as an oral historian, but I still consider myself a disc jockey. I’d play all these records: Andrés Segovia, followed by Ravi Shankar, then Dizzy Gillespie. And I’d interview musicians. Andrés Segovia told me this story: There was an audience of five thousand in Ann Arbor to hear him, one old man — I call him “old”; I’m ninety-three, and he was eighty at the time — with a guitar, a classical guitar, delicate, and they leaned over listening as he played a Bach transcription. After the performance, one of his admirers came up to him and said, “It was wonderful, but you play so softly. I had to lean forward and listen so hard.” “You know what I did next time?” Segovia said to me. “I played even more softly, so that he listened even more.”

I loved music as a kid. I never played an instrument, and I can’t carry a tune, but I’d hear that music, the music played by black bands — the patrons were all white, but the bands were black. And then folk music came about during the Great Depression. When I was an actor, I ran into this group called the Almanac Singers. They sang at labor rallies and traveled in a jalopy around the country. And that group had Woody Guthrie in it.

One day they came to Chicago Repertory. We were doing a play about a strike or something. I’d just gotten married, and my wife and I had a two-and-a-half-room place with a pulldown Murphy bed. I sent these guys back to my place about twelve o’clock at night to sleep. I write a note to my wife to send along with them. It says, “These are good guys. Put them up for the night.” Well, she’s asleep, and the bell rings about 12:30 at night, and she goes to the door. There are four guys standing there: A little, freckle-faced guy; that’s Woody. And a kid with a big, bobbing Adam’s apple; that was Pete Seeger. And a huge man from Arkansas named Lee Hayes. And one other. They were there for two weeks, sleeping on the floor together. And one night I woke up, and Woody was asleep, and in the wastebasket were about twenty crumpled pages, single-spaced, and, so help me, it was fantastic writing. And I threw it away, wouldn’t you know.

Shapiro: Around 1949 or ’50 you had your own TV show, but then you lost it.

Terkel: That’s right. Studs’ Place, it was called. It was all improvised. There was a plot, usually about ordinary people’s lives, but the dialogue was created by the cast. I was on the air on nbc in Chicago — the whole country wasn’t covered yet. And a guy came from New York, from nbc, and said, “We’re in big trouble. Your name is on all these petitions.” It was some civil-rights petition, and a couple more for the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. And he said, “Don’t you know that the commies are behind this thing?” And that’s when I got cute and said, “Suppose the communists come out against cancer. Do we have to come out for cancer?” And he said, “Not funny. All you have to do is say you didn’t mean it. It was a mistake. You were taken in by the commies, and you apologize.” I said, “But I am an Anti-Fascist Committee guy. I am for civil rights. I’m not going to take back that stuff.” And they fired me.

So I wasn’t working for a while, but I was fairly well-known in town, and women’s clubs would hire me, pay me a hundred bucks a shot to talk about jazz and folk music and play some records. And at every luncheon they were threatened by this Legionnaire in town, a self-proclaimed lieutenant of Joe McCarthy [the anticommunist Republican senator from Wisconsin]. And he would call these women’s clubs up and warn them that I was a Red. Not one paid attention to him.

There was one elderly woman, very elegant, from an old-money family. She was so furious at this guy that she said, “Mr. Terkel, we are doubling your fee to two hundred dollars as a result.” So I had no other choice but to write to this guy. I sent him a ten-dollar check and said, “You’re my agent, it turns out. You got me an extra hundred dollars, so I’m giving you a 10 percent commission. Thanks very much. Keep it up.” I never heard back from him.

And then I got a job at wfmt, this remarkable Chicago radio station. Meantime, I knew Mahalia Jackson because I’d heard her record “Move On Up a Little Higher.” I’d never heard a voice like that before, so I went to the Olivet Baptist Church, where she was singing — all the churches claimed her, you know — and she and I got to be friends. I started playing her records on my radio show.

I’ve been credited with being the one who made Mahalia world renowned. What a sad commentary this is. Much of African America knew Mahalia’s stuff — she’d pack a ballpark in a black neighborhood — but no white guy knew her music. I was a white disc jockey, so I did play a role, no doubt. But people are giving me credit when they shouldn’t be.

Later, when cbs hired her for a network radio show, she said she would do it under one condition: that Studs Terkel is the host. So they trembled, but they did it. We were rehearsing when another guy from New York came in a half-hour before the show. He was very friendly and said, “Mr. Terkel, this is nothing, just a form for you to sign.”

I asked, “Does everybody get this?”

“No, no, this is just for you.”

“What is it?”

He didn’t say, so I read, “I am not and never have been . . .”

I said, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to do it.” And his voice was rising: “But you must.” I said, “But I mustn’t.” Mahalia heard this ruckus and said, “Is that what I think it is?” She knew about me. She said, “Studs, you’ve got such a big mouth, you should’ve been a preacher. What are you going to do? Are you going to sign it?”

“Of course not.”

“OK, then let’s rehearse.”

And the New York guy said, “Oh, Miss Jackson, Mr. Terkel.” He got very polite then.

Mahalia said, “He just said no — let’s rehearse.” The guy persisted. Finally she said, “I’m getting a little tired of this. You tell Mr. Big, or whoever it is, if they fire Studs Terkel, they can find another Mahalia Jackson.” You know what happened? Nothing. The show ran for twenty-six weeks, and nothing. What’s the moral? To say no! Say no to authorities you think are full of crap. Who the hell are they?

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