Philadelphia, where he also died, David Goodis lived mostly with his mother except for a brief period when he worked on screenplays in Hollywood. Decent films of his works were turned out there: Nightfall and Dark Passage are two of the better ones. But the best job was done by Truffaut with Down There, retitled Shoot The Piano Player.” At the start of Gifford‟s own memoir, The Phantom Father, he dedicates the book to Nelson Algren. Inside he writes about listening to the radio as a kid, and mentions hearing for the first time the Valentinos do Lookin’ For A Love by Bobby Womack. Elsewhere in Read ‘Em And Weep, a collection of miniature pieces on his favourite novels he mentions how “growing up in Chicago, Algren meant a lot to me.” He describes Algren‟s Chicago: City on the Make as “a pithy, prole prose poem to a town that never really cared for its artists”.
Gifford credits Studs Terkel with trying to convince people about Chicago‟s artists. Terkel himself loved to tell a tale about when Nelson Algren met Billie Holiday. As he tells it in his memoirs Talking To Myself, this was in 1956, and Studs had gone to see Billie perform in a South Side Chicago cellar. Nelson Algren accompanied him. About the performance itself Studs writes quite beautifully: “Billie‟s voice was shot, though the gardenia in her hair was as fresh as usual. Ben Webster, for so long big man on tenor, was backing her. He was having it rough, too. Yet they transcended. There were perhaps fifteen, twenty patrons in the house. At most. Awful sad. Still, when Lady sang Fine And Mellow, you felt that way. And when she went into Willow Weep For Me, you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed her own.” Audrey Morris has said she first heard Billie Holiday sing as a child while listening to Studs Terkel on the radio at home in Chicago: “Most of my knowledge of songs comes from Studs Terkel's radio program, The Wax Museum, where he played all kinds of interesting recordings. A beautiful show. A beautiful man.” I first heard Audrey Morris sing when her The Voice Of … LP was included on a Girls of Bethlehem CD. I had no idea what it would sound like when I bought it, but I was at the time just getting really, really interested in the irregular jazz independent Bethlehem and its catalogue.