Pervis Spann, “The Blues Man” of Chicago radio, has been a major force in promoting the blues over the past four decades. Spann started as a DJ, promoted concerts at the Regal Theater, co-owned one of the city’s top blues nightspots, and acquired radio stations of his own. Along the way, he booked or represented the biggest names in blues, including B.B. King, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, Albert King and Little Milton. Spann was born on August 16, 1932, in Itta Bena, Mississippi, in the heart of Delta blues country. A self-described workaholic, Spann made money as a teenager both picking cotton and managing a local movie theater, and after moving to Battle Creek, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, and finally Chicago after a stint in the military, he worked in a steel mill, drove a taxi, and repaired television sets. He used the G.I. Bill to attend broadcasting school and although he finished last in his class, he was able to combine his knowledge of radio with a business sense of how to use his down-home approach to make money from programming and promoting the blues to an audience he knew very well, since many Chicagoans were also Mississippi transplants. Spann started out on WOPA radio in 1959, and when Leonard and Phil Chess of Chess Records launched WVON in 1963, they hired Spann to fill the late-night blues spot. Spann and fellow DJ E. Rodney Jones promoted blues and R&B concerts and in 1965 purchased the former Club DeLisa, which was later renamed the Burning Spear. When new ownership scuttled WVON in 1978, Spann secured shows on WYEN and WXFM before he and another former WVON personality, Wesley South, acquired the old WVON frequency (1450 AM) to start a new blues and gospel station, WXOL, in 1979, eventually reclaiming the original call letters as well. In 1984 Spann expanded to Memphis with another station, WXSS. During the ’70s and ’80s Spann presented a number of all-star blues festivals at auditoriums and arenas in several cities. Spann is now retired from active promotion and radio work, and his daughter Melody Spann-Cooper runs WVON as a talk show station.
Pervis Spann was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2012. He passed away on March 14, 2022.