When Studs Terkel Spoke Truth To Power In A Sullen World -A Tribute From NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source”

A link to an NPR Christopher Lydon-hosted Open Source program on the style and effect of the late great ordinary folks interviewer Studs Terkel:  

radioopensource.org/sound-of-studs-terkel/

By Si Lannon

It was probably Studs Terkel via a series of book reviews of his interviews trying to get a feel for the soul of the American from Sam Lowell that I first heard the expression “speaking truth to power.” Maybe I am off a bit and it was not Studs but if it was not him then it was certainly the way that he conducted himself in the world, in the attempt to give what Si Lannon always has called “giving voice to the voiceless,” the small everyday people who filled Studs’ ears. Spoke that message to a sullen world then, back in the day when people would queue up to have their say (and mostly although not always in a civilized manner, especially around race the bedrock on which America was founded and has not found a way to get away from except to attempt to flee from it at every opportunity). Unfortunately since that time the world had not gotten less sullen. Nor has the need to speak truth to power dissipated since Studs passed from this mortal coil of a world that he did so much to give ear and eye to. The problem, the real problem is that we in America no longer produce that pied piper, that guy who will tell the tale the way it has to be told. Something about those gals and guys who waded through the Great Depression, saw firsthand in the closed South Side Chicago factories when people lusted to work but were unceremoniously shut out that something was desperately wrong with the way society operated. Then slogged through World War II and didn’t go face down in the post-war dead ass could war night spoke of grit and of a feeling that the gritty would not let you down when the deal went down. When Mister (Peabody, James Crow, Robber Baron you name it) called the bluff and you, you alone maybe with family but not more, stood there naked and raw.        

Fellow Chicagoan writer Nelson Algren (he of The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On The Wild Side) put the kind of gals and guys Studs looked around for in gritty urban sinkhole lyrical form but Studs is the guy who found the gritty unwashed masses to sing of. (It is not surprising that when Algren went into decline, wrote less lucid prose Stud grabbed him by the lapels and did a big- time boost on one of his endless radio talks to let a candid world know that they were missing a guy who know how to give voice to the voiceless, the people with small voices who are still getting the raw end of the deal, getting fucked over if you really want to nitty-gritty truth to power). Check this Open Source link with Christopher Lydon out to see what it was like when writers and journalists went down in the mud, went deep into the recesses to get to the spine of society.