A half-century of previously unpublished interviews with legendary musicians, in a brand-new book from America's foremost oral historian "I'm one of these people that thinks that everybody has certain gifts, you know, when they're born I used to play the guitar when I was ten, you know. So I figured maybe my thing is playing the guitar, maybe that's my little gift."Bob Dylan, interviewed in 1963, from And They All Sang Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel hosted a legendary daily radio program on WFMT in Chicago, presenting listeners with his inimitable take on a wide range of music from classical opera to jazz, blues, gospel, folk, and rock. His latest work of oral history shows us this completely different side of Studs Terkelthat of a brilliant and far-ranging musicologist. And They All Sang features over forty conversations with some of the greatest musical luminaries of the past century: rock icons Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, influential folk singer Pete Seeger, jazz geniuses Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, classical musicians Andres Segovia and Ravi Shankar, legendary opera divas Rosa Raisa and Edith Mason, and gospel giants Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson. Transcending genres and generations, Studs Terkel goes behind the music and doesn't miss a beat. Musicians featured include: Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Guthrie, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Keith Jarrett, Alan Lomax, Catherine Malfitano, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, Ravi Shankar, Richard Tucker.

The name Studs was a nick-name derived from the function character Studs Lonigan in James T. Farrell's 1920s trilogy. Studs Terkel is one of the great oral historians of this century. His literature speaks to and for the common man. He was born in 1903 and throughout his life he never drove a car but preferred to take a bus and share life with the regular people.Studs started his career in the early '50s doing interviews for radio WFMT in Chicago. By the mid '60s his interviews were being noticed and his first oral history was published. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 book The Good War. He has been inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received an award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation.In best-selling books that began in 1970 with Hard Times, and a legendary radio show that started on WFMT in Chicago, Studs Terkel told the tales that real people had told him. IDEAS host Paul Kennedy interviews Studs Terkel.