Chicago disc jockey/promoter Pervis Spann at WVON in 2002.
Scott Stewart / Sun-Times file
Legendary disc jockey Pervis Spann of WVON-AM, who helped make Black radio a powerhouse in Chicago, died Monday at 89 at his South Side home from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Spann’s melodious voice and catchphrase on the overnight shift — “Pervis Spann, the BLUES man” — helped countless workers and college students get through all-nighters by listening to their transistor radios.
The native of Itta Bena, Mississippi, “went very quickly from being a sharecropper to a shareholder,” said his daughter Melody Spann Cooper, chair and chief executive officer of Midway Broadcasting Corporation, which owns WVON.
His broadcast career lasted more than 60 years. He was hired at WVON by Leonard Chess, co-founder of Chess Records, who bought the station in 1963, according to Shawnelle Richie, speaking for the Spann family.
He became known as one of WVON’s “Good Guys” — a group of star DJs that included the late Herb Kent.
Mr. Spann — who also worked as a concert promoter — was credited with boosting the careers early on of Aretha Franklin, B.B. King and the Jackson 5.
Growing up, “It was nothing to wake up, and B.B. King would be here or Johnnie Taylor,” his daughter said.
The late Mayor Harold Washington said Mr. Spann helped spread the message about his City Hall candidacy.
He produced shows at the old Regal Theater. In the early 1960s, he helped buy the Burning Spear nightclub at 55th and State streets.
He also acquired radio stations in Atlanta, Jacksonville, Florida, and Memphis.
In a 2013 Chicago Sun-Times interview, Mr. Spann said: “I am the first Black American that built a 50,000-watt radio station on United States soil. And I built it in Memphis. It was like having twin boys [with WVON]. This was in the 1980s. I could listen to my station in Memphis riding up and down the Dan Ryan Expressway.”
After Chess died in 1969, WVON went through a series of ownership changes. Mr. Spann and fellow “Good Guy” DJ Wesley South formed Midway Broadcasting Corporation in 1979 to run the station.
Growing up in Mississippi, Mr. Spann was picking cotton before he was 10 years old, according to an oral history done for the website the HistoryMakers. By 15 or so, he was managing a Black theater in Itta Bena. Later, he followed his steelworker-father James Henry Spann to Indiana, where he worked construction for Youngstown Sheet and Tube in East Chicago, he said in the interview.
During the Korean war era, he served stateside in the Army.
“He wanted us to be educated,” his daughter said. “Her felt there was no ceiling to what we could become or what we could be. He was a workaholic. He never drank. He never smoked.”
Also, she said, “He was such a good father that any guy who I ever dated, if he was not up to par, I just couldn’t be with him.
“He used to teach us, ‘There’s no big me’s and little you’s. You want to treat the prisoner like the president,’ ’’ she said.
Mr. Spann is also survived by his wife of 67 years Lovie, his son Darrell, who was his caretaker, and daughters Latrice Levitt and Shante Spann. Funeral arrangements are pending.
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