This was going to be a conversation about music, but Terkel's mind and interests are catholic -- given his awesome breadth of knowledge, one should rightly say encyclopedic -- and not easily restrained. When he finally does submit to questions, what unfolds is a meandering monologue. Go ahead, try to stop him in mid-thought and just see how far you get, for today he is keeping one eye on the television set, where a baseball playoff game featuring his beloved White Sox is in the early innings, and besides he is, to use his own phrase, "deaf as a post." Both of these conditions make it a bit of a challenge to interrupt his flow of words. But at 93, maybe Terkel has earned the right to follow his muses and talk about whatever the hell he wants, all in his familiar pinched voice that sounds like the recording of a 1930s broadcaster calling a horse race.

Over the course of an hour, his interests will include, but not be limited to: his own biography (born Louis Terkel on the Lower East Side, afflicted with asthma; moved to Chicago at age 8, where his health vastly improved; misguidedly attended and graduated from law school but didn't take the bar; spent more than six decades as the foremost U.S. oral historian, interviewing thousands of people; underwent a quintuple bypass nine years ago and open-heart surgery last August); the promise of the New Deal; films about flood control made in the 1930s that would be relevant in today's post-Katrina United States; Ronald Reagan's mass firing of the air-traffic controllers; the lack of a single-payer national health-care system in the country and its theoretical relation to the exercise of capital punishment; the right-wing slant of public television; weapons of mass destruction; Tony Blair as the butler Jeeves; and dozens and dozens and dozens of names, for Terkel seems not to have forgotten anyone he's ever met.

In recognition of his lifetime spent accumulating stories of the American Century, the Chicago Historical Society recently announced the creation of the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, where his 5,000 hours of taped interviews will be stored along with those conducted by other historians. Many of his interviews can already be heard on-line at studsterkel.org.

But because this conversation is supposed to be about music -- pegged to the release of Terkel's 16th book of interviews, And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey, which contains his encounters with 44 performers, composers and presenters from 1953-2001, when he hosted a radio show on the Chicago station WFMT -- he begins with a mention of Bob Dylan, whom he interviewed when the singer was 22 years old. " 'The executioner's face is always well hidden,' " Terkel says, quoting from A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. "I particularly love that line," he says. "Even now, the executioner need not be there, and yet may execute millions -- you need not guess to whom I'm referring." And Terkel is off now, tumbling for the next 15 minutes through American and British politics.

Sometimes, though, Terkel just appreciates music for its own sake, for the effect it can have on the human spirit. After all, he inherited his love of song from his father, a poor Jewish tailor who would risk his wife's verbal attacks for spending two precious dollars on an Enrico Caruso record that would transport him to another plane. "Listening to that voice, that told me everything about the human race, the possibilities that are there. Our better angels!" he exclaims.

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