Terry was sitting on his porch tapping away on a laptop when I walked past him on an unusually warm autumn day. Then in the middle of the street, I stopped and talked myself into walking back to say hello. I wondered what it was like to live in such an unusual house. Are we, as Winston Churchill once said, ‘shaped by the buildings we live in?’ It was the middle of the pandemic, and I was considering a new series: “People and their Houses.”

As I approached Terry, he greeted me with a big smile and a genuine, “Well, hell-o!” In an instant, it was easy to be swept into Terry’s uncommon charisma with an openness as vast and wide as Lake Michigan. Later, after reviewing the recording of our interview afterwards, I reconsidered the metaphor—-here is a man with creativity that flows like an endless fountain. Terry’s uncommon gift for writing songs in particular, began when he was still a child, writing for his fourth grand class assembly:

“Little Johnny crossed the street 

When the light was red

He won’t do it anymore 

‘Cause Little Johnny’s dead.”

That’s quintessential Terry. He grew up to become a extraordinarily witty writer, not only of advertising for LEO BURNETT—-remember Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, the Green Giant?—-but also for television shows, plays and musicals, including “Doo Lister’s Blues,” his epic Civil Rights Era drama challenging the suppression of political content in Black Pop Music in the ‘60s, inspired by Gil Scott-Heron which foreshadows the rise of Hip Hop and celebrates the impact of Jewish Americans on the fight for social justice. Terry also stands as a unique presence in championing the role of the Blues as the first, and most enduring, voice of protest in America, and as an inspiration for young people, struggling to share their voices with the world in the way those voices are meant to be heard. Terry shares these insights in his music through the prism of personal experience.

One gets an education in music history talking to him, too. Music is what moves him but also has helped him through some difficult times like, when at 14, his parents got divorced:

“Woe is me, but this is stuff in the minus column and…how am I gonna deal with this? Am I gonna laugh about this or am I gonna be bummed about it? And I was always expressing myself because I had a lot of angst in me, a lot of something I had to get out, as Johnny Lee Hooker would say, “The Blues is in him and it had to come out.”

Portraits are subjective by nature. Who are we? In Terry’s case, I would say, listen to his music.

He’s in his songs, their subject matter, their rhythms. And Terry is also a good example of how one should not judge a book by its cover, or even a photograph because who we are goes far deeper than what we look like—-looking at him you would never guess that Terry is part of Chicago Blues history, having penned three songs with the legendary Muddy Waters, including the Grammy-winning, “Bus Driver.” Terry tells me that his inclusion in this series of “unsung heroes” is brilliantly fitting —-after all, 50 years since he co-wrote “Bus Driver,” his portrait is being exhibited in a bus shelter!

And listen carefully to the words that have been sung by Muddy Waters, Prince, Joan Jett, John Lee Hooker, Clarence Clemons and Shemekia Copeland! Terry’s life is hardly “unsung…”