Life is a collection of unique moments.
A great kiss. A real last call. The first rock concert.

For many British musicians, the moment comes with the first bite of a Vienna pure beef Chicago hot dog. This rite of passage happens at Wrigleysville Dogs, 3730 N. Clark, across the street from the iconic Metro music club. Oasis dropped in at Wrigleysville several years ago. Former Public Image Ltd. and Nine Inch Nails drummer Martin Atkins, takes his English mates to the stand.
Atkins remembers the first moment he bit into a Wrigleysville dog.....

.....Initially we told them to take the salad off," he says over a well-dressed hot dog. "The pickle, the hot peppers? A Chicago hot dog is just alien. But I was surprised how good it was."

Hundreds of local bands also beef up at Wrigleysville -- that's how it is spelled -- before a show. The up-and-coming Chicago pop-rock band the Future Laureates recently before they headlined Metro.

"After a show we have to load out, and there isn't much time to think about food," says bassist James Hyde. The 27-year-old moved from Yellow Springs, Ohio, to study physics at Loyola University. "The hot dog is much more of a cultural identity thing in Chicago."

Metro production manager Rachelle Spicer adds, "Anyone who eats when they come to Chicago wants Chicago dogs. The Brits are intrigued by that place. They see it right when they get off the bus."

Wrigleysville has been serving weenies to rock fans and Cubs fans since 1992.
Atkins, 53, has been eating there during the entire run. "This place was always 'hovering,' " says Atkins, who teaches music courses at the Madison (Wis.) Media Institute. "I was here with Pigface [the industrial rock supergroup that has included Steve Albini, Flea and Trent Reznor]; we had 16 people in here. I was here with Killing Joke. Maybe the first couple times you were delighted to come in here. As you get older you aspire to not do the hot dog and fries. Then it becomes, 'Do you have any sushi in the neighbohood?' But this is the kind of place you end up whether you wanted to or not."

Peter Sdralis opened Wrigleysville and still can be found behind the counter with his son Tom, who manages the 40-seat restaurant with his older brother, Bob. Metro owner Joe Shanahan regularly brings over an up-to-date schedule of the venue's bookings.

Peter Sdralis (Andrew A. Nelles photo)

Another operative question is when was the moment in time Peter Sdralis realized the 8-feet-wide sign on Clark Street said "Wrigleysville" and not "Wrigleyville."

"I called it Wriglesvyille dogs when I ordered the sign," Sdralis said. "We didn't know it until we put it up." He is from a rural town south of Athens, Greece. Sdralis has a thing with the letter 's.' "I've been 52 years in the restaurants business," he says in a thick Greek accent.

The Wrigleysville sign is a major photo op for locals and tourists. Late French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson influenced a generation of photographers by searching for the "decisive moment."

You can screw up a decisive moment by putting ketchup on a hot dog.

"Mustard, onion, relish, tomato, onion, pickles, sport pepper," says Tom Sdralis, 30, sitting near a recent Rolling Stone magazine spread of the indie band the Walkmen visting Wrigleysville. "Bands just tell us to make it Chicago style. If they want ketchup, we'll give them a bottle."

The Sdralis family and Shanahan remember Snoop Dogg ordering a hot dogg -- er, dog -- at Wrigleysville. "The last time, he had one of my runners driving around downtown at 5 in the morning trying to find a McDonald's," says Spicer, who has been at Metro since 2000.

Wrigleysville is open from 10 a.m. until 4 a.m. six days a week, and until 5 a.m. Sundays.

Father and son.

Many friends who played an embryonic role in my cultural reporting have recently taken the long walk to the other side.
I'm starting to feel a little lonely.

And Chicago singer-songwriter Eddie Holstein, who was also my enabler at O'Rourke's tavern, was close to the edge. But I'm happy to report he took a lickin' and kept on tickin.'.
Here's part of a nice little e-mail I got last night from Eddie.....

...."I had some surgery last August. It turned out to be way more complicated than anybody expected, and I've been in and out of hospitals (mostly in) for the past six months. However, I am now sprung, down over 100 lbs. from the Extra Large Eddie you saw in my YouTube performance from last June, feeling great, and fighting tigers again. My very sincere thanks to all my friends who wrote and supported me during my illness."

Eddie will make a fun return to performing at 8 p.m. May 11 at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave., playing guitar alongside fellow OTS teachers Nathaniel Braddock and Chris Walz. Tickets are only $12.

Here's Eddie's performance from last June at the living wake of Earl Pionke, the gregarious owner of the Earl of Old Town folk club, who died last week.
Hang with it. It is great:

Eddie's best known composition "Jazzman," was popularized by Bonnie Koloc, Pure Prairie League and the late Steve Goodman. Between 1981 and 1988 he operated Holstein's on Lincoln Avenue, booking dusty troubadors like Ramblin' Jack Elliot with his younger brother Alan. The late Roger Ebert was a fan of Eddie's. And a friend.

Like all the great folk singers, Eddie is a raconteur. He is 65 years old and has never driven a car.

Joe Mitchell, observer.

Like a singing Joseph Mitchell, he has walked all over the city. In 1997 I walked around Hyde Park with Eddie. At that time he was living near Bryn Mawr and Clark in Andersonville. He walked to the Wilmette-Skokie border to visit his mother.
That's a three-hour walk. One way.

"Walking fascinated me as a child," Holstein told me on that fall day in 1997. He was born atop his father's drugstore at 79th and Michigan.
"I'd walk to the Rhodes (movie theater) by myself," he said. "I'd see some urban movie like 'Miami Expose.' You'd walk out and you'd still be in the movie. You're a kid. And you're fantaszing you're the movie detective walking down the mean streets. Mean streets? In those days, car washes were on 79th Street."

Do yourself a kind favor.
Welcome back Eddie Holstein, who has never missed a step in the measured manner in which he looks at life.

My everlasting image of Artie "Blues Boy" White did not come from a down home set I saw at the dimly lit East of the Ryan nightclub or hearing a dusty '45 that was in heavy rotation at the Checkerboard Lounge on East 43rd St.

It was served 'round midnight in the the spring of 1998 in the Malaco Records recording studio in Jackson, Miss.
Mr. White died April 20 in a Harvey hospice from complications of pneumonia. He was 76.

The long time Chicago resident had engaging Southern Soul hits like "Leaning Tree," "Don't Pet My Dog" and "My Dessert."
Mr. White had just finished a recording session in the spring of 1998.........

......He looked tired but hungry.
His producer Tommy Couch, Jr. looked around the modest studio and said, "There's a group of people that want to take the blues from a certain time period, put it in a glass bottle and put a cork in it. To where it can't breathe anymore, where it is preserved." He hoisted an imaginary bottle into the dense Mississippi air. He continued, "Then they can take this glass bottle, put it to the light and turn it at every angle and look at it. And try to duplicate it. Well, music is a growing and ever-changing thing. So is the blues." Mr. White nodded his head in agreement.

Mr. White was one of the last hard core devotees of Southern Soul.
He dug his his heels deep into his convictions.

Southern Soul singers like Mr. White, Bobby Rush (who headlines this year's Chicago Blues Festival), the late Little Milton Campbell and the late Z.Z. Hill departed from 12-bar blues and deployed saucy use of horn sections. The most authentic sound is raw and loud, devoid of elaborate electronics. Many Southern Soul singers, like Mr. White, grew up in the church but also found a commercial home for ribald material that played well in urban nightclubs.

Mr. White was a well known headliner at clubs such as East of the Ryan and the White Rose in Phoenix, Ill. During the early 1970's Mr. White owned Bootsy's near 22nd and Cottage Grove. He also appeared at the Chicago Blues Festival, his most recent set being in 2006.

Mr. White was born in Vicksburg, Miss. and moved to Chicago in 1955 where he became a truck driver delivering goods to Chicago area department stores. He sang with the Full Gospel Wonders gospel group in Chicago before crossing over into the blues in the early 1960s.

Mr. White's "Don't Pet My Dog" was composed by Chicago songwriter Bob Jones. Mr. White sang of an old school gentleman who left his wife at home with his dog. In a 2007 interview with Mr. White, Jones recalled, "The hook was, 'Don't pet my dog, and please don't hold my woman's hand.' If you can hold a lady's hand and pet the dog, you've made yourself too familiar. Something else has gotta' be going on.
"You've never heard that have you?"

Southern Soul always arouses curiosity.

Jones has written more than 900 Southern Soul and blues tunes. His first placement came in 1976 when he wrote "Leaning Tree" for Mr. White. He continued to write more than 20 songs for Mr. White.

Why was Mr. White such an effective conduit for Jones material?

"Style and delivery," Jones answered on Sunday. "Artie was a soul blues singer. He wasn't a traditional blues singer. Swagger was part of his profile. It was part of him period. It was like, 'I'm still your friend, but I'm it period. I'm the thing."

In his acclaimed book "Southern Soul-Blues" (University of Illinois Press, 2013), David Whiteis wrote, "White is pretty old school, his thick, vibrato-heavy vocals reflect his early gospel roots and he's made few concessions to modernism."

Here's Artie completely out of his element on Chicago's beloved "Chic-A-Go-Go":

Jones met Mr. White in 1967 at the Bonanza nightclub, 7641 S. Halsted. Garland Green and Freddie Scott were featured performers at the Bonanza and although Bobby "Blue" Bland did not perform there he liked to have a nip at the club owned by an Arkansas school teacher.
"We got into a conversation about Little Milton," Jones recalled. "Artie and Milton were real close friends. I knew Milton. Artie told me he was a performer. He had a show the next week in Gary (Ind.) and wanted me to come to the show. We became friends from there."

Mr. White recorded for several powerful Southern Soul labels including Ronn/Jewel/Paula in 1985, Ichiban in 1987, and Waldoxy, a subsidary of Malaco where Mr. White had the hit "Your Man is Home Tonight."

Ironically, Mr. White's death comes just a week after the passing of iconic Southern Soul songwriter George Jackson who wrote hits for the late Johnnie Taylor, Denise LaSalle, Little Milton as well as Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock n' Roll" and "One Bad Apple (Don't Spoil The Whole Bunch" for the Jackson 5. Mr. Jackson died April 14 of cancer at the age of 68.

Mr. White was preceded in death by his wife Emma Lee. He is survived by his wife Betty, seven children, 23 grandchildren and 42 great grandchildren.

An all star musical tribute featuring the Artie White Blues Band, Otis Clay, Billy Branch, Cicero Blake and others will be held between 5 and 9 p.m. April 26th at Gatlings Chapel, 10133 S. Halsted. The event will be hosted by Herb Kent and Cookie Taylor, the daughter of the late Koko Taylor. Visitation at 10 a.m. April 27 followed by a 11 a.m. funeral service at New Faith Missionary Baptist Church-8400 S. Halsted, Chicago, IL.

The film "Born in Chicago" about the white Chicago teens (Michael Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Charlie Musselwhite, etc.) who migrated to the south side in the early 1960s to learn blues from the masters will make it's Chicago debut at 6 p.m. June 6 at the Vic Theater, 3145 N. Sheffield.

"Born in Chicago" includes interviews and /or performances from Bob Dylan, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, the late Hubert Sumlin, Jack White, Steve Miller, the ubiquitous Harvey Mandel, Sam Lay and others. "Born in Chicago" is narrated by Marshall Chess of Chess Records fame.

Following the screening a concert will feature the core band Chicago Blues Reunion (Nick Gravenites, Barry Goldberg, Mandel, Corky Siegel) and special guests Musselwhite, Eric Burdon and Elvin Bishop. Other stars will be announced.

"Born in Chicago" debuted at SXSW last month. It was slated to play at CIMMfest (Chicago International Movies & Music Festival) this weekend but was delayed in post production.

The film was directed by Chicagoan John Anderson ("Brian WIlson Presents SMilLE"), produced by Chicagoan John (producer of Eric Clapton "Crossroads" concert DVDs) and co-produced by Goldberg,. Executive producers are Timm Martin, Chris Stewart and Bert Moreno of Out The Box Records in Northbrook. The project was born in 2004 after Out of the Box invited Anderson to a Chicago Blues Reunion concert at FitzGerald's in Berwyn.

Tickets to the June 6 premiere, which features a pre-show dinner, go on sale the first week of May.

James McCandless had a big workingman's heart that carried around life's humble glories.

The Chicago singer-songwriter was a fixture at dozens of Chicago music rooms including the Abbey Pub, the No Exit Cafe, the Old Town School of Folk Music, the Earl of Old Town and FitzGerald's in Berwyn, where he debuted his latest record "Lucky Day" in February. McCandless died April 16 after a fall in his north side home. He was 68.

The "Lucky Day" CD cover featured a photo of natty Mr. McCandless and his wife Dee on their 1985 wedding day.
Mr. McCandless was a craftsman who absorbed everything around him....

Mr. McCandless and Dee attended the Woodstock music festival. The first one. They painted crackers on the side of their van, which broke down outside of Cleveland, Ohio. They hitchhiked east until a kind driver took them to Woodstock---Vermont. Their tent and their dog Max are in the movie.

"My songs are not beyond people," Mr. McCandless once told me over a beer at a North Side bar.
"They're right there. The feelings and the thoughts. I keep my ears open. Words jump out at you and that's usually the starting point. Then I grab the guitar and try to put the music to the rhythm of those words." Mr. McCandless sang with the distinctive resonance of Johnny Cash or Roger Miller. He adroitly blended Western storytelling with American folk idioms.

You heard him once and you remembered him.

Mr. McCandless was born in Hanford, Washington. He had worked for 15 years as a Chicago electrician. His father was an electrician who worked on the plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Mr. McCandless quit his electrician gig because the job was rough on his hands, but again, he used his observational skills to write songs about tradesmen. Mr. McCandless's grandfather Grover Cleveland McCandless (his great grandfather was Franklin Pierce McCandless) was a turn-of-the-century pioneer.

Mr. McCandless taught classical guitar between 1982 and 1988 at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
Ron Lazzeretti is a Chicago songwriter who accompanied Mr. McCandless on guitar on and off since 1996.

He cited Mr. McCandless's 1991 release "Out West Somewhere" along with the Beatles Sgt. Pepper as one of his top ten all time favorite albums. "Out West" has not been heard by nearly enough people," Lazzeretti said. A song called 'In the Fog' ends the record." And he recited the lyrics:

"In the fog, in the rain, by the riverside
There were pledges made in the dark that night
And they hung in the air like Chinese lights.
In the fog, in the rain, by the riverside."

Lazzeretti explained, "He wrote in the same way Randy Newman puts out very simple language but seems to carry a lot of weight."

Long time Chicago singer-songwriter Chris Farrell met Mr. McCandless in the early 1980s at the Earl of Old Town. Mr. McCandless showed up a a Sunday night open mike hosted by brilliant singer songwriter Frank Tedesso. "Any one of Jim's lyrics would stand up on it's own," Farrell said. "A song lyric doesn't need to do that. It is meant to be sung. It isn't anything negative about the lyric if it doesn't recite well. But Jim's did. They were amazing. They could work either way."

Jim Craig is owner of Hogeye Music, 1920 Central St. in Evanston. He carries a complete catalog of Mr. McCandless's CDs. "He was a musician's musician," Craig said. "He was always saddened by the fact that he wasn't better received in by critics, and I guess the public. But every musician in town will know about Jim McCandless and the quality of his work."

Mr. McCandless was a bit of a racounteur. A few years ago he met an Irish woman at the airport who told him it had been 'six years from home' since she had been to Ireland. Lazzeretti recalled, "Jim said that's how the Irish talk--it's instantly poetic. She was using time as a measure of distance. That applied to a lot of what he did. Jim was a poet, but it wasn't the type of poetry that had you scratching your head."

Mr. McCandless then composed the instrumental "Six Years From Home."

Pete Seeger was a fan of Mr. McCandless.

Mr. McCandless once shared a typewritten single spaced 1985 letter from Seeger which read in part, "At my age I'm unable top learn much in the way of new songs, bit you've got a lot of great poetry there. Don't be surprised if other poets start swiping your prized lines like 'If housework was a lawsuit, I'd settle out of court'."

In recent years Mr. McCandless had endured diabetes and a kidney transplant. "With the health challenges he hadn't been putting out as much music," Lazzeretti said. "But in the last three or four years he was releasing a CD a year. He got real prolific."

Singer-songwriter Andrew Calhoun knew Mr. McCandless for more than 30 years. During the mid 1980s Mr. McCandless opened a volume of poetry to Baudelaire poem and put it in Calhoun's lap.
Here is the conclusion of the poem, "The Albatross." (Translated by Richard Wilbur):

"...This rider of winds, how awkward he is, and weak!
How droll he seems, who late was all grace!
A sailor pokes a pipestem into his beak;
Another, hobbling, mocks his trammeled pace.

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
Familiar of storms, of stars, and of all high things;
Exiled on earth amidst its hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, borne down by his giant wings."

Mr. McCandless is survived by his wife.

They had lived together 19 years before they got married in '85.
In 1988 he smiled and said, "We're sort of like moldyweds. So on our anniversary, I buy her flowers, a box of candy and I write her a song.
"Those are the things you do on your anniversary."

A memorial service is being planned.

Chicago used to be a far away magical place.

If you are a Cubs fan one of the better ways to detach yourself from the current dismal product is to read books about Cubs history. There aren't many happy books on all that, but there are times that are better than the ones we are living through. I was at yesterday's game where I endured five Cubs wild pitches in one inning, a ninth inning game tying home run and a Cubs game losing balk.

I went home to continue with the new "Mr. Wrigley's Ball Club (Chicago & the Cubs During The Jazz Age)," an exhaustively researched nugget by Roberts Ehrgott (University of Nebraska Press.) I even loved the Art Deco cover. Didn't Art used to play third base for the 1932 Cubs? Don't forget to tip your waitresses.....
.

I recently was in a flea market where I picked up a mail order catalog from the winter of 1939.
In big bold letters the home location was CHICAGO MAIL ORDER, CO. and folks could buy exotic things like boxed 'lovely lingerie" that will "give her a real thrill." .

Like jazz and Hack Wilson, this magic wasn't so easy to find in Waterloo, Iowa.

Last week Huffington Post writer David Landsel delivered his "10 Terribly Overrated Destinations (and Where to Travel Instead.)"
The former Chicago resident ranked Chicago 7th. We have lost some magic and I agree.

In part, he wrote, .."Chicago is a handsome, reasonably entertaining provincial capital. This used to be enough for Chicagoans, but then it wasn't, leading to a period of time, beginning around the turn of the new century, during which all manner of foolishness -- from baffling things built by celebrity architects to a slew of obnoxious restaurants -- was unleashed upon the city. Suddenly, everything was pretty much the same, except now it was way more expensive...."

Landsel is spot on.

For example, the "secret" Pilsen restaurant El Ideas (elevated ideas) is one of the most pompous examples of the Chicago culinary scene. You can only make reservations online, menus are not revealed and customers are supposed to bring a bottle of wine for the chef. Chefs also make themselves available for photo ops.

Who goes to a place like this? Not a real Chicagoan.

Landsel continued, "...Instead, try Go to Detroit. It's more honest. Also, there's a great art museum, a proper public market, some of the country's best architecture, the music scene is fun, the food scene is better than it has been in ages and the beer is better and much cheaper. Everything's cheaper."

Right again. Chicago has nothing like Detroit's Eastern Market.
Here's a link to the Mountain Dew farmers I found in Detroit.

There's a lot of work for Chicago to do to regain some of the cultural luster of a magical place.
I'd kill off Taste of Chicago in all shapes and forms.
I'd spread that money around to give the Chicago Blues Festival the world class status it currently lacks. I'd open up a monster year round farmer's market accessible to all walks of life. I'd gut check our roots in the bold ethnic spirit that exploded here and once gave people a real thrill.

Wendell Smith wrote a series of 1961 articles for the Chicago American that changed the fabric of baseball.

His Jan. 23, 1961 front page story for the American appeared under the headline "Spring Training Woes." Smith wrote in detail about the bubbling resentment among black players who suffered "embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities" during spring training in Florida. Hank Aaron and Minnie Minoso were segregated from white teammates and families. White players stayed in some of South Florida's finest hotels such as the Sarasota Terrace in Sarasota.

Ernie Banks told Smith, "I am sure I am speaking for every Negro player in the big leagues when I say we are very grateful to the Chicago American for bringing this situation to the attention of the American public."

And this was already 14 years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line.

"It was quite a series that Wendell wrote," Wendell's wife Wyonella said after a recent preview of the Jackie Robinson bopic "42." "His friends who were writers said he should have gotten a Pulitzer Prize for the series. Wendell broke it down. (The White Sox) Bill (Veeck) and Arthur Allyn refused to stay at those (white) hotels. They said they would go somewhere else.........

....."Every year (White Sox pitcher) Early Wynn hosted a dinner and invited all the writers and their wives. He didn't invite Wendell and me. Jerry (Holtzman, the legendary Sun-Times and then Tribune baseball writer) and Marilyn didn't go. They were the only other couple that didn't go. They had dinner somewhere else.
"It didn't matter to us, because that's Early Wynn's problem, not ours. You knew what kind of people they were.
"They were segregationists."

L to R: Jackie Robinson, Chicago Cardinals great Duke Slater, Wendell Smith, Ralph Metcalfe
Courtesy of Wyonella Smith

As early as 1939 Smith conducted a series of interviews with the managers of white major league teams. He wrote that 5 of the 8 managers were willing to sign black players. Leo Durocher, the future Brooklyn Dodger manager of Jackie Robinson was one of them.

Robinson died on Oct. 24, 1972 at the age of 53.
Smith died on Nov. 26, 1972 at the age of 58.

At the time of Robinson's death he was writing a Sun-Times column.
Wyonella told me his final column was Robinson's tribute. (reprinted here.)

Smith wrote, in part, "...Jackie Robinson was always himself. He never backed down from a fight, never quit agitating for equality. He demanded respect, too. Those who tangled with him always admitted afterward that he was a man's man, a person who would not compromise his convictions."

Wyonella donated boxes of Wendell's papers to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. "He was an avid reader of course," she said. "He was a civil war buff. He had many books pertaining to the civil war. When I moved I sold all those books. I had no place to keep them."

Brian Carroll wrote a fantastic paper titled "Wendell Smith's Last Crusade: The Desegregation of Spring Training, 1961," which was published in the 13th Annual Cooperstown Symposium of Baseball and American Culture.
Carroll said that one of the more "bothersome inequities" for black players was their inability to spend spring with their families. According to Smith, black players who faced discrimination and poor housing were unwilling to bring their families into a hostile environment.

Wyonella, 91, loved "42," but she was skeptical about the way the movie depicted how much time Rachel Robinson spent with her husband on the road, for this very reason.

Andre Holland as Wendell Smith in "42."

Smith also suggested the players of '61 meet with club owners.

Carroll wrote, "Organizing the article like a legal argument, Smith then described the contributions black players had made since Robinson broke through in 1947, specifically those of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays Ernie Banks and Minnie Minoso. Echoing Robinson's argument in "The Sporting News" in 1956, Smith also cited the money clubs spent in and attracted in Florida towns in which they trained, revenue few towns would have wanted to lose......
".....Smith's approach was consistent with that of Martin Luther King, Jr. in it's tone, dignity, and first-hand experience with the conditions being challenged. Though Smith is due credit for the spring training campaign, which according to one columnist (Milton Gross), was hugely successful, that credit has for the most part eluded him."

Earlier this week Major League Baseball announced the White Sox will host baseball's annual Civil Rights Game on Aug. 24.

There will be no better time to honor Wendell Smith with a statue or the renaming of the U.S. Cellular press box in recoginition of his crusade.

Several years ago I was in the WVON-AM south side office of Pervis "The Blues Man" Spann when he called his rhythm and blues singing friend Bobby "Blue" Bland on speaker phone.

"Spann was the man!," Bland declared from East Memphis, Tenn. "He played everybody--blues, soul, rhythm and blues. He had a radio station WXSS-AM, 1030 in Memphis that gave competition to the stations around here."

Spann looked around his dusty office. He did not smile.

He looked foreword as he always did and 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.
"Then I'd ride all over my native Mississippi listening to my station (He was born in rural Itta Bena, Miss.). Made me feel good. That's the reason, Bobby Bland, I didn't have no girl friends..........."

Here's some vintage Spann for your soul. Be patient. The blues man comes in at the end of the track:

Audio of Pervis Spann Live

Good Guy Moses "Lucky" Cordell joined WVON in 1965 and worked his way up to station general manager. "We had from 8 to 80 back then," said Cordell, 84. Herb Kent had the kids, Pervis had the adults and we were in between."

Spann's daughter Melody Spann-Cooper is now president of WVON-AM. She has worked in every department at WVON including sales, traffic, programming and answering phones for her father's Saturday night show.

WVON is the city's only black owned and operated radio station.
"Urban heritage stations don't survive,' Spann-Cooper said last week during a conversation at WVON studios, 1000 E. 87th St. in Chicago. "All you have left is WVON and WDIA in Memphis, which is actually older than us. Black people were coming into civil rights when WVON came on (in 1963) and moved into an area of black power. As the country progressed you had more of an influx of music and more conglomerates buying stations."

WVON is managed by Midway Broadcasting Corporation, which was formed in 1979 by Pervis Spann and the station's evening talk show host Wesley South. (After the 1969 death of Leonard Chess the Chess family sold the station to Palmer House heir Potter Palmer and George Gillette of shaving cream fame.) Even present day print moguls Gannett took a shot at owning WVON in 1977.

Community came first in the early days of WVON.
The still-active Herb "The Cool Gent" Kent, E. Rodney Jones, "Butterball" Bill Crane and other "Good Guy" personalities hand-delivered Christmas baskets to South and West side churches and schools. They were purchased from the proceeds of WVON Christmas albums decorated with "Good Guy" pictures.

In an interview before his 1995 induction into the Radio Hall of Fame Kent told me, "We raised money for bona fide black power agencies. We raised money for Rev. Jesse Jackson's Breadbasket and Operation PUSH. We raised money for H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, all these people. W were heroes.
"And people hung on to our every word."

There was also a deeper connection between the on air personalities and the talent.
"I'd come downstairs and Al Green would be at my house," Spann-Cooper said. "Johnnie Taylor. Berry Gordy would send his records to WVON first because he knew if it was a hit in Chicago it would be a hit all over the country." Spann-Cooper recalled that Diana Ross was a guest host for a week at WVON.

WVON deejay Bernadine Washington and the Good Guys.

Cordell added, "When Jesse Jackson came to Chicago he was the country preacher. He had no church. Rodney Jones brought him to our attention. We had meetings with him. We were impressed with the way he talked. We got behind him and we promoted him. Without a 'VON, there would not be a Jesse Jackson as we know today.

Current morning host Matt McGill added, "As a kid I remember hearing Rev. Jackson's voice on WVON and Operation Breadbasket as it originally was. And when you think about some of the phrases we associate with Rev. Jackson so much, "I Am Somebody.' You heard that again over and over again on WVON.

"In the late 1960s you had gang activity going on with the Blackstone Rangers and all that. The city had a department called the Commission on Youth Welfare. It was planted in the heart of Englewood. My father (Winston McGilll, president of the 3rd Ward Democratic Party) reached out to the kids in Englewood who were being influenced by gangs. He reached out to some of the churches. In this moment of black independence, it was critical the community was not losing young people to the temptation of joining street gangs. Because the street gangs were able to persuade young people that they meant black independence: 'We are self determined, nobody is going to tell us how to live in our communities.' My father had an opportunity to meet and work with (late World Heavyweight Champion) Ezzard Charles, who also worked with the Commission on Youth Welfare. My father had an instinctive feel on what community was all about. I picked up on that." Future Mayor Harold Washington was often a guest host on WVON.

Just a few weeks ago Cooper-Spann spoke at a BMO Harris Black History Project event.
"I asked a question that threw people off," she said. "I said when you talk about chicken in the corporate world of Harris, what would be the first place you think about?"

The group answered with Kentucky Fried Chicken.

She continued, "When you think about it on the south side and west side of Chicago, they're going to say Harold's. That is our own voice. That is authentically ours. It doesn't make anything else bad.
"But I still find value in this."

More Audio of Pervis Spann Live