[Studs Terkel with Dave Marsh, part 1]

Raw footage of Studs Terkel with music critic Dave Marsh on WFMT, who is promoting his new book "The Heart Of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made." Terkel plays clips from Marsh's list of the greatest rock singles ever made while Marsh explains their deep connections to society and culture. (Note: while music plays, their dialogue is inaudible.)

00:00Copy video clip URL Color bars until 00:29Copy video clip URL.

00:29Copy video clip URL Terkel pre-interviews Marsh before they go on-air. The document shown is Marsh’s list of his favorite rock songs of all time, which they will play and discuss.

01:53Copy video clip URL Terkel introduces Marsh to his audience, asking him about “the nature of rock and the role it plays.” Marsh explains that rock and roll sprang from a fusion of many styles, including jazz, rhythm and blues, and country, and combined musical traditions of whites and blacks. He plays Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” to illustrate his point. “Even in the era of segregation and ‘separate but equal,’ there was no way to enforce the musical barriers completely,” Marsh says. “What rock and roll did, and Elvis in particular, was explode the whole thing and make it very explicit, coming just a few months after Brown vs. Board of Education, that this music was going to be publicly acknowledged.” He also shares a story about legendary music producer John Hammond.

10:14Copy video clip URL Marsh introduces the falsetto song “The Wind” by the Doo-wop group Nolan Strong and The Diablos. Terkel doesn’t like the song, finding it too “saccharine” and “white” for a black singer. Marsh disagrees, saying that records like this “turned his life around,” helping him overcome the racist environment that surrounded him during his childhood in 1960s Detroit. “When I heard these kinds of rhythm and blues records, one of the things it said to me was … that black people have as much depth of feeling in their lives as anyone I had ever met. And therefore, all the inequality and segregation and racism I had been brought up with had to be wrong.”

15:05Copy video clip URL Marsh delves further into the racial and social issues that impelled him to write his book, sharing deeply personal experiences from his past. He introduces Madonna’s “Live to Tell.” He explains that the song captivates him because, in just two lines, it encapsulates the modern anti-drug movement and in peculiar way, has the power to “heal the human heart.” Marsh tells Terkel that in his exploration of music, he’s “using [records] in the way that you use people, to draw out of people what they were trying to hide, the secret story they thought they were ashamed of.” The tape ends in the middle of the Madonna song.