For much of the 70s and 80s La Donna Tittle was the queen of local black radio. She was number one in her time slot, showered with awards, and tens of thousands of fans roared when she took the stage at funk and R & B concerts. A longtime midday fixture on local radio, she was, as her nickname put it, your Tittle in the Middle.
Her mother, Juanita, among other jobs, managed the pool hall and also a record store, McKee’s Bop Shop, at 47th and South Park Way (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive). Tittle recalls being a young girl watching DJs Al Benson and McKee Fitzhugh do remote broadcasts in the store window; if they were running late, her mother would jump on the air herself to spin records. Tittle tended to her four younger siblings, and she picked up odd jobs as well. Working behind the candy counter at the Regal, she fell in love with R & B music.
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“I was her first teacher,” says Herb “the Kool Gent” Kent, who in the 60s was a key member of the “Good Guys,” an influential group of black DJs on WVON. “She would come over to my office and I would teach her. She wanted to get into the right profession–she was born with the voice and was very personable, and she was just a gorgeous woman. I often wondered how someone who looked like that could live in the projects.”
In 1978 WJPC, owned by Johnson Publishing’s John H. Johnson, lured Tittle away from WBMX, doubling her salary. Popular DJ Tom Joyner had the morning slot; in between Joyner and early-evening DJ Bebe D. Banana, Tittle became Tittle in the Middle. WJPC quickly became a powerhouse, sponsoring major concerts like a Parliament-Funkadelic show at Soldier Field in 1978. Joyner was also WJPC’s program director, and under his leadership DJs were free to break away from the smoothness that typified black radio; they appeared together on a novelty Christmas hip-hop single, “Christmas Delight,” on which Tittle rapped and crooned intentionally off-key. On the air, Tittle was silly, raucous, and loud: she joked with callers, gossiped about recording artists, and had her mother, “Mama T,” call in to offer advice and comments on current events.
In December 1989 John H. Johnson sold WJPC, ending Tittle’s run at the station. After brief stops at a Joliet blues station and smooth-jazz radio at WNUA, she began working full-time at WGCI in 1992, beginning nine difficult years there. “This was the beginning of corporate radio,” she says. “It pays good, good benefits, but it is so formatted, and it is not fun. You have no control over the music you play. You had a list of songs [and] you just play exactly what comes up and in that order. At ‘JPC they trusted your knowledge of the music.”
Just before the Fourth of July weekend, around the same time she started at WKKC, Tittle got a call from her agent, tipping her to an audition for the R. Kelly video. In early 2005 Kelly released “Trapped in the Closet,” a five-part melodrama that featured him singing a convoluted narrative over a spare track punctuated by heartbeatlike surges. The songs, and the soap-opera-like videos that accompanied them, quickly became a national phenomenon. Kelly has eagerly responded–he’s released 12 parts thus far and has promised there are more on the way.
