Bob Dylan |
Ideas sir! That's what you really need to sing
Studs Terkel has recorded 50 years worth of interviews with the great singers of the 20th century, writes Piers Plowwright
AND THEY ALL SANG by Studs Terkel
Granta Books, £15.99 order this book
LONG before Garrison Keillor invoked the old glories of American Radio, Studs Terkel was hard at work with his microphone and tape recorder, chronicling, challenging and celebrating the richness of human lives, famous and obscure.
From the 1950s onwards, he hosted a legendary radio programme in Chicago and this book is a collection of 50 years of conversations on that show with some of the great voices of the 20th century.
And I mean voices: Bob Dylan, Tito Gobbi, Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lotte Lehmann, Janis Joplin, Marian Anderson, Betty Carter, and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, along with conductors, composers, and performers who made people and instruments sing.
The title comes from Leonard Bernstein, one of the interviewees: “In the olden days, everybody sang… it was the mark of a cultured man to sing, to know music. And to treasure the history that music – particularly sung music – carries.”
The Kentucky folk-singer and composer, Jean Ritchie, recorded in 1957, remembers a family reunion on the front-porch of the home they had all grown up on years before. As they sang, memory moved and time stopped: the lovely past was not gone, she says, it had just been shut up inside a song.
A text, of course, can never give you the tone of voice, the richness of accent, and the varieties of cadence that make the human voice so stirring, though Terkel does his best with notes and glosses to help you.
But you long to hear the “haunting falsetto” of singer and composer John Jacob Niles, his style of speech “part WC Fields, part circuit-riding evangelist, part old-time medicine man”. And while we all know what Dylan and Armstrong sound like, what about the gentle guitar giant, Andrés Segovia, or the “cracked Viennese accent” of that great Mozart conductor, Josef Krips?
Never mind, there’s enough meat in these interviews to feed on, without sound, whatever your musical tastes. Segovia, in a particularly vivid 1978 interview is wonderful on how to dominate a great hall by compelling silent attention and the sitar-player and composer, Ravi Shankar, gives one of the best insights into Indian music that I’ve read or heard.
Here’s Bob Dylan in 1963, still a rumpled young folk poet, explaining the real meaning of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – nothing to do with nuclear fallout by the way – and here’s jazz pianist Earl Hines in 1976 explaining the joys of improvisation: “It’s more fun when you’re fishing around. You don’t know what you’re gonna catch.”
Terkel is a model interviewer, knowledgeable, tactful, but gently probing. He has the great gift of sympathy and he knows when to shut up.
He draws out from his subjects anecdotes, details, memories and regrets in a way that avoids the “sleeve-note disease” so prevalent in musical discussion, particularly about jazz.
Dizzy Gillespie, for instance, flows free into politics with a great description of playing in Athens at a time when rocks were crashing through the windows of the United States Information Agency there.
“After the concert, in front of a wildly enthusiastic audience, the same Greek kids who’d been throwing rocks grabbed me up and had me in the air… I thought they were going to dash me to the pavement… but it was the best audience I think we had overseas.”
What better tribute to the power of music over political division, 40 years before Daniel Barenboim’s and Edward Said’s East-West Divan Orchestra.
My favourite interview is the first in the book, with the already mentioned dean of American Balladeers, John Jacob Miles, composer of Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.
Describing how he learnt to sing the spiritual, The Seven Joys of Mary, “after singing it awful – it fell like pieces of wood on the floor,” he says, “I went back to the Old Testament, where the prophecies were made and then I caught the spirit of the thing. The reason people fail with songs is they’re saying words and singing notes but they’re not singing ideas. Ideas, sir! That’s what you’ve got to have!”
And that’s what this engaging and touching book has in abundance.
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