By the time I hit high school, Studs Terkel had started hosting his radio show on WFMT, and I was enthralled by how wide and eclectic he made the world sound. He would play everything from blues and Mexican son jarocho to Central African music, Indian classical music, and flamenco, and he interspersed the music with interviews of all sorts of people—film and theater directors, actors, poets, blues singers, architects and industrial designers, orchestra conductors, folklore collectors, choreographers. Decades later, Studs Terkel’s program might have been called a “world music” show, but he did it without the label, before it was a marketing category, and that made it more thrilling: your ears could roam, and you heard unexpected echoes between far-flung corners of the globe.
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