You Talk to Me

Q: What sources of information do you depend on for your news?
Terkel: I watch TV. I watch baseball games a lot, of course. PBS is a joke. PBS is as much of a joke as Fox. Moyers is the one exception, and that’s it.
Q: Do you listen to National Public Radio?
Terkel: I do and I don’t, both. I don’t hear too well, anyway. National Public Radio has gone more and more bland.
Q: What do you read?
Terkel: I read all kinds of stuff. I find the Chicago Tribune has changed considerably since the Colonel’s day [referring to Robert R. McCormick, the newspaper’s longtime rightwing owner.] It’s still a conservative paper, but I think it’s a more honest paper than The New York Times. I get more out of the Chicago Tribune than I do The New York Times. I believe it more, though I do admit I love Frank Rich of the Times.
Q: What other journalists do you admire?
Terkel: A kid named Tom Frank, who just did What’s the Matter with Kansas? Sy Hersh certainly has done an excellent job. I like Bill Greider. Young journalists on alternative papers.
Q: How did you start doing interviews and oral histories?
Terkel: I got into interviewing accidentally. I became a disk jockey before the word was used. It was an eclectic program with a select following. I would play, say, “Umbra mai fu,” a Caruso aria from Handel’s Xerxes and then go into Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” and, after that, a Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl ballad.
And I would play the record of a certain woman I heard sing in the Greater Salem Baptist Church in Chicago. Her name was Mahalia Jackson. I loved this record, “Move On up a Little Higher.” All the black people in the country knew it. None of the whites knew it. So I played it, and so whites got to know it. Mahalia always said, “Studs, you’re the one who led me to the white world,” which, of course, is untrue. She would have been known anyway.
Q: Were you ever blacklisted?
Terkel: When Mahalia Jackson became internationally known, CBS offered her a network radio program. Once a week. And she said, “I’ll do it on one condition, that Studs is the host of the program.” And they tremulously agreed.
During the third week or so of the dress rehearsal, about a half hour before the audience is let in, a guy from CBS in New York comes on the stage with a little piece of paper for me to sign. “Oh, Studs, this is just a pro forma.” And it’s a loyalty oath. “Throw it away. I don’t believe in that.” He says, “You gotta.” “No, I don’t. You know the brethren? I’m with the brethren. My yea is my yea and my nay is my nay. And that’s it. I’m sorry.”
Voices are raised, and Mahalia is on her way to the piano to rehearse. She hears this argument. She knows all about me. She used to say, “Studs, you’ve got such a big mouth, you should have been a preacher.” She said, “Is that what I think it is, baby?” I say, “Yes.” “Are you going to sign it?” I say, “Of course not.” She says, “OK, let’s rehearse.” He says, “Oh, but Miss Jackson,” and he’s very diffident, “Mr. Terkel has to sign it. Headquarters, New York, the official word.” Mahalia says, “Look, I’ve got no time for this. You tell Mr. So-and-So that if they fire Studs Terkel, to find another Mahalia Jackson.” And you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened. The guy vanished. The emperor had no clothes.
If I were in New York or Hollywood, I would have been dead meat. For example, I never made Red Channels. You know what Red Channels was? Red Channels was the bible, the scripture, put out by a couple of political thugs, listing people that were considered un-American. And all sorts of people were on it -- Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Lillian Hellman. Where is me? I don’t find my name on it. And I felt like a blue-haired dowager who didn’t make the Social Register. You know what I attribute that to? New York parochialism.
Women’s clubs would hire me to talk about folk music. At that time, they paid me 100 bucks. But there was a guy in town, a legionnaire, who was a one-man Americanism committee. And I was his favorite pigeon. He would write these warning letters to the local women’s clubs not to have me. And to their everlasting glory, not one canceled.
But this one woman I’ll never forget. She was elegant, aristocratic, old, old money, Brahminesque. And she was so infuriated by the letters, she said, “Mr. Terkel, we are doubling your fee from $100 to $200.” What do you think I did? I wrote the legionnaire a letter, and I sent him a $10 check with a note saying, “Here’s your agent’s fee for the extra 100 bucks.” He never acknowledged my check.
Q: You’ve kind of set the standards in doing interviews.
Terkel: Standards were set thousands and thousands of years ago. I’m called an oral historian. I have no idea what that means. It means I’m a nonacademic, really. In my books, you can find the astonishing wisdom and eloquence of people who have never spoken of their lives before.
Q: When you approach an interview, do you have questions written out?
Terkel: I improvise.
Q: Tell me about your interview with Martin Luther King Jr.
Terkel: Mahalia Jackson became his favorite singer. One day Mahalia called and says, “Studs, come on over. Martin wants to talk to you.” He never even heard of me. So I go over. I said, “I know your time is limited, Doctor.” He says, “No, no, you go ahead.” I asked him about the role of laughter. He says, “Without laughter we’re lost, the laughter of adversity.”
Q: If you were able to go back into time, who would you like to interview?
Terkel: George Bernard Shaw, of course. Think of what he did. He helped form the Labour Party, which was not the same as the Labour Party of Tony Blair. Can you imagine? And Shaw wrote some of the best, most witty, most thoughtful plays. He also was an orator, and just for conversation alone and letter writing, no one came close to him.
After Shaw, I think, Mark Twain and Tom Paine. That’s not a bad trinity.
Q: What are you working on now?
Terkel: I’m working on a book on music. I’ve interviewed all sorts of artists: opera singers and composers, jazz musicians, and, of course, folk singers. It’s called They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disk Jockey. I hope I get to finish it.
[for The Progressive, November 2004]

You Talk to Me

Studs Terkel talks to David Barsamian about astonishing wisdom and eloquence