A funeral was being held Wednesday for legendary WVON-AM disc jockey Pervis Spann, who helped build a Black radio powerhouse in Chicago.
Mr. Spann “was the one who named Aretha Franklin the ‘Queen of Soul,’ ” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
In the early ’60s, Mr. Spann and another of the “Good Guys,” E. Rodney Jones, helped buy the Burning Spear nightclub at 55th and State streets, where the Jackson 5 won their first major talent show, his daughter said. Davis said WVON helped swing crucial votes to Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman in the U.S. Senate, and President Barack Obama.In a 2013 Chicago Sun-Times interview, he 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. . . This was in the 1980s. I could listen to my station in Memphis riding up and down the Dan Ryan Expressway.
. 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.He made two unsuccessful stabs at public office — in 1991, when he ran in Chicago’s Republican mayoral primary, and in 1999, when he ran for the Chicago City Council in the 18th ward.
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