The Blues and Gospel were among the most important influences on Studs Terkel’s views of art and society and he was a fierce and joyful champion of the music on his radio show on WFMT (and earlier radio programs he hosted).

The appetite for the new embodied by Terkel’s chosen epitaph “Curiosity did not kill this cat!” is wildly alive in the topic of Experimental Music.

The Studs Terkel archive of interviews with jazz artists is an astonishing collection! Internationally recognized, self-taught pianist, composer, recording artist, and educator, Reginald Robinson, talks about a few influential jazz conversations.

In addition to blues, classical, folk, jazz, rock, world music and other familiar categories of music, Terkel reached across borders to talk about music in broad and genre-defying ways.

Terkel and his guests explored the role that religion played in various music genres, whether gospel, folk, classical or world music, especially how spiritual messages are intertwined with the striving for social justice and a sense of shared traditions.

While Terkel was already in his 50s when rock and roll became a cultural phenomenon, he remained curious and open to how this music revealed new currents in American and global culture as well as how these new forms of music grew out of connections with older music genres such as blues, jazz and other popular music forms from the past. Among the rock and pop guests were Eric Burdon of The Animals, punk poet Jim Carroll, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, Kris Kristofferson, Don Mclean, Loudon Wainwright and Frank Zappa.

As a celebrated oral historian Terkel was attuned to how people and societies pass along knowledge from generation to generation and how these stories evolve from the particular to the mythic over time.

Terkel wrote in the introduction to his 2003 book Hope Dies Last, “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up,” and the programs from his radio archive that focus on the struggles for peace demonstrate this idea with raw immediacy.

Studs Terkel’s radio program, with its deeply rooted humanistic approach to the big questions of human life and social organization, was filled with a philosophical inquiry and search for deeper meaning.

Terkel’s bestselling oral history book Race: How Blacks & Whites Feel about the American Obsession from 1992 synthesized a topic that was central to him throughout his entire career and the conversations in this topic are among the most meaningful contributions in the archive in helping understand both the great flaws and potential in American society.