“Dialogue with the Dean” welcomed Chicago radio executive

Melody Spann Cooper may be Chicago broadcasting royalty, but she isn’t the least bit uneasy about wearing that crown. 

Positive, engaged, and ready to do the work, Spann Cooper is the chair and CEO of Midway Broadcasting Corporation, Chicago’s only Black- and female-owned broadcasting company. As the final 2023–24 guest in Dean E. Patrick Johnson’s “Dialogue with the Dean” series, she joined him May 21 in the Hal and Martha Hyer Wallis Theater of the Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts. 

“I want to be joyful every day,” she said. “I control the energy wherever I am.” 

In a lively 90-minute conversation, Spann Cooper detailed her unconventional ascent in the business world, the importance of radio in community and crisis communication, the unheralded value of a communication degree, “moments versus movements” in DEI, and how she keeps a level head in a high-pressure, competitive business. “We all grind,” she said of her family’s legacy. “I don’t mind working.”  

Born in Englewood and raised in Auburn Gresham, both on Chicago’s South Side, Spann Cooper was the middle child of a homemaker mother and a Mississippi-born cab-driver-turned-radio-mogul father, Pervis Spann. “In a relatively short time, he went from sharecropper to shareholder,” Spann Cooper said. “He dreamed so big and was so smart—a real visionary.” 

The elder Spann started out with a late-night blues show on Chicago’s WVON—1690 AM, then the “Voice of the Negro”—and was promptly christened “Pervis Spann the Blues Man” (he was also the first to call Aretha Franklin “the Queen of Soul”). He cultivated a devoted following and soon helped expand the station and its holdings. Spann Cooper started working with her father at age 15, though she had little inclination to pursue radio or business—her ultimate interest was journalism. But legal disputes between her father and his business partner led a judge to suggest that then 30-year-old Melody take over the company. Surprising even herself, she responded, “Absolutely.” 

“It’s always been that trusted voice,” she said of Midway Broadcasting’s flagship station, now flanked by Spanish-language station WRLL and digital streaming network VONtv. “In a communications world, there is so much noise; WVON is a touchpoint for Chicago.” 

Especially for Black Chicago. Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks had a show in the 1950s; “Blues Man” Pervis hosted a “sleepless sit-in” to raise money for Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s; later the station broadcast conversations with a promising young community organizer named Barack Obama. Though WVON played music in its early days, its current format is talk radio.  

Spann Cooper also stressed the importance of AM radio in times of crisis. When bad weather or bad actors hit a cell or FM tower, communications go down. But as she noted, “AM is a ground game” and frequently “the only reliable source of information.” She has testified accordingly before Congress on multiple occasions, most recently to oppose auto manufacturers who want to take the AM frequency off their cars’ radio dials. 

In addition to her work at Midway, Spann Cooper is cochair of the Diversity and Inclusion Council for the Obama Presidential Center, a commissioner of the Illinois Liquor Control Commission, a trustee of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, and the author of The Girlfriend’s Guide to Closing the Deal. In May she delivered a commencement address at her alma mater, Loyola University Chicago. 

“Dialogue with the Dean” is a series of conversations with emerging and established communicators who are advancing the futures of their fields, challenging paradigms, and promoting social justice. The 2024–25 series will begin this fall, focusing on film.