Tanya Hart Drops the Mic: Veteran Radio Host and Producer Talks Radio, Black Hollywood, Children’s TV, Music, Family and Revolution
by Christy DeBoe Hicks
Tanya Hart is more than the sum of her parts, and her parts are quite impressive. She is a multimedia host, producer, commentator, company owner, content creator, podcaster, media coach, musician, wife, and mother. She is currently the host of Hollywood Live with Tanya Hart, a syndicated program that broadcasts to 300 stations on American Urban Radio Networks (AURN), the No.1 Nielsen-rated national audio network company reaching African Americans, which garners more than 25 million weekly listeners. She also creates content for AURN’s new media and online services, including her popular podcast Hollywood Live Extra.
Hart has been recognized with numerous awards, including The Diversity In Media Award from the Caucus for Producers, Writer, and Directors. In 2016, she began the first of her two terms as the co-chair of the Caucus. She was the first and only woman to chair the industry organization since it began 46 years ago. During her tenure, the organization raised nearly two million dollars in scholarships for a diverse group of film students. Hart also has received four Emmy Awards (eight Emmy nominations), and five medals from the International TV and Film Festival of New York. Hart has also won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for her documentary films Great Black Women: Achievers Against the Odds and Mississippi Summer. She has also been inducted into the Michigan State College of Communication Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame.
Hart has been with the network for 22 years, though she began by doing freelance projects for them. The AURN marked her return to her radio roots. She says she has always enjoyed radio, which is why she sticks with it. The late Lovell Dyett, who was a WBZ Boston radio personality and one of her first mentors, told her, “If you get a radio gig, don’t ever give it up.” Hart says that she has come to understand what he meant, and she agrees.
This Los Angeles-based media maven also heads her own company, Tanya Hart Communications, a multimedia firm that provides media coaching for a variety of corporate and private clients, among other services. The company worked on two awareness campaigns with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one related to breast cancer (2009–2011) and the “Act Against AIDS” campaign (2015). In 2012, the company produced the national radio campaign for “Get Out the Vote” in association with the NAACP.
While working with her media clients, Hart continued her production and on-air work. She was a producer and guest DJ on Live in Hollywood, a syndicated television show that aired weekly in most of the country from 2006 to 2007. From 2001 to 2005, Hart hosted the daily syndicated radio feature Hart Moments, which her company also produced.
Beginning in 1995, Hart spent four years as an entertainment correspondent on the KACE-FM morning show in Los Angeles. She was also a regular on the syndicated program, The Geraldo Rivera Show for several seasons, and her company also produced entertainment news segments for the program. Her company has done contracts with several media outlets, including ABC, NBC, Inside Edition, plus other radio and online outlets. Hart was based at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, C.A., from 1992 to 1995, where her company developed and produced films, television programs, syndicated radio programs, and music with Boston International Records and Hollywood Records.
Hart first came to Los Angeles from Boston in 1990 to set up Black Entertainment Television’s west coast production operations and launch its first show out of BET’s Burbank Studios. She was both host and producer of Live from L.A. with Tanya Hart, where she interviewed all the major celebrities of our time in more than three hundred episodes. At the end of her two-year contract with BET, she decided not to renew, but she and her husband decided to stay in Los Angeles so that she could pursue other opportunities.
Hart has also served as host with the late movie critic Roger Ebert, covering the Academy Awards. She has a great fondness for that experience and for Ebert. She also appeared as herself on the long-running ABC daytime serial All My Children. For six years she served as a correspondent and alternate host of E! Entertainment’s The Gossip Show, which was seen in 140 countries.
Hart can currently be seen in Paramount Studios’ Oscar-nominated documentary feature film Tupac: Resurrection, which features her interview with the late rap star, and VH1’s TV movie Play’d: A Hip Hop Story.
Hart has interviewed some of the biggest celebrities and icons in the world, including Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, Cicely Tyson, James Brown, and Luther Vandross, but if she has to choose the most important interviews she did, she says, they would be Muhammad Ali and Tupac Shakur. “I’d choose them because Muhammad Ali kicked off my career with his interview and Tupac kept my career going with his.”
Hart says that besides being a host and producer, she has also become a brand. The Tanya Hart brand means she knows Hollywood and she has access. “That’s important because when I first started covering the Oscars, which was 1997, there just wasn’t a lot of us [African Americans] out there. There still aren’t. We are now doing the red carpets for people all over the world because everyone wants a piece of the action and I deliver,” she says. Godfather of Soul James Brown told her the importance of branding and audience loyalty early on: “Don’t ever forget your brand. Stay true to your brand, and stick with them, because they’ll stick with you.” And, she affirms, “I’ve listened to James and that’s what I’ve done. Especially in the radio space. And he was right.”
Growing Up: Hollywood Was Not the Plan
Hollywood, celebrities, and media were not the stuff of dreams for Hart as she was growing up in Muskegon, a small port city on Lake Michigan in Northwestern Michigan.
Her father, Lewis Hinton, was Canadian, and her mother, Jean Hinton, was originally from Waterloo, Iowa, but had moved to Detroit with Hart’s grandmother after her grandfather’s death. Lewis and Jean met and married in Detroit, but he loved hunting and fishing so the couple made their way to Muskegon.
This was a second marriage for both her parents, but they did not have any children. The Hintons adopted Hart when she was five months old. “I did not grow up with siblings, but I did know my siblings because my biological mother was a good friend of my aunt’s,” she says. “My mother was always open about letting me know that I was adopted, and who I was adopted from because they were good people,” she says, “So, it was interesting growing up because I had two families.”
While Hart was never interested in journalism, she says that she had a notable relative on her father’s side of the family who was. Mary Ann Shadd was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first Black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. Shadd edited The Provincial Freeman, established in 1853. Published weekly in southern Ontario, it advocated for equality, integration, and self-education for Black people in Canada and the United States. Hart said her father’s family, including Shadd, had been a part of the Underground Railroad since it first started bringing escaped slaves to Canada.
Hart’s career ambition was to work in the medical field as a technologist. She attended Michigan State University, where she majored in biology. Things changed after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Tensions grew in Detroit and on-campus and Hart decided she needed to do something. Perhaps Hart did not have an interest in publishing, but she embodied her families’ spirit.
“I took two friends with me — Larry Redd and Bernard Carver. We grabbed some James Brown albums and went to WKAR, the campus radio station, and told the program manager that he needed to put us on-air because the campus was about to go in an uproar,” she recalls. “WKAR was a 50,000-watt station in East Lansing, Michigan, that students didn’t have access to at that time. But they put us on the air. So that day, April 4th, 1968, was the day my career started.”
After that, says Hart, she was on the air almost daily. The show she created had the very 1960s name: The Taking Care of Business Show. And while the name changed at some point, the show stayed on the air for more than 40 years.
She says that her show created an opening for other students to have access to that radio station. “At that time, we had folks like Angela Davis and other Black Panthers,” she said. “There wasn’t a big voice for students. But we had phones, and you could call in. So, then I started getting death threats and all of that. It was an interesting time.”
Hart finally switched her major to communications, because, she says, “It seemed like that’s where I was going to end up.”
In another one of her life’s unexpected turns, a friend Chuck Demery, a graduate student who had opened the door and let them into the radio station on the day that Dr. King was assassinated, changed her life again when he introduced her to a friend of his, Philip Hart, the man who would become her husband.
It was not love at first sight. Demery had asked Hart and her roommate, Sandrea Young, to ride with him to New Rochelle, New York, because he had to go home to respond in person to the draft notice he’d received. Hart was going on the trip because he was meeting his girlfriend there. They were getting to New York by driving a car to Fort Lee, New Jersey for a soldier who was stationed there. The road trip was a comedy of errors. None of them ever considered how they would get back to campus. Tanya found Phil Hart to be haughty and says he didn’t speak to her or her roommate for the whole ride. When they took two cars to continue the trip from New Jersey to New Rochelle, she lost the coin toss to see who would ride with Phil. The car they were in blew up and she had to spend the weekend with him and his girlfriend. In a maneuver that seemed like a precursor to Go Fund Me, Tanya Hart says Phil managed to raise enough money from other girlfriends to fly the four of them back to Lansing, Michigan.
When they returned to campus things changed — a lot and quickly. Tanya and Phil were married the next year when she was 20 years old. She finished her undergraduate degree while he completed the requirements for his Ph.D. degree.
During that time, they had a daughter, Ayanna, who is their only child. She currently is a partner and COO of Fancy Films. Hart is also a grandmother whose granddaughter, Chloe seems to be following in her footsteps. She is studying radio production and community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is a junior.
The East Coast Television Vibe
After Phil graduated, her husband got job offers from several universities. They chose to move to Boston, where Phil Hart co-founded the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; he also served as a professor of sociology, department chairman, and director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black Culture.
Almost immediately after arriving in Boston, Tanya Hart received a call from Group W (Westinghouse Broadcasting). “They had heard about me,” she recalls. “I’m not even sure how, but they called and told me that they had a management training program that they thought I would be great for. And so, I said, ‘I just moved here and I have a young baby, and I’m not sure this is the right timing for me.’”
The late Winthrop Baker, who Hart says was a king-maker in television at the time, asked her to meet with him at WBZ-TV. Astonishingly, he said to her, “We want you to do this. Bring your baby to work with you, if you must.” She recalls, “That was so revolutionary at that time. I will never forget him.”
Group W’s management training program included specific segments: sales and advertising, news, and community affairs, and public affairs. Hart says that she was exceptionally good at sales, and the company wanted her to stay in that department after the program.
She liked sales but chose not to continue in it because the culture of the business became difficult for her. “These guys would take me to New York, and I was selling shows to Proctor & Gamble. They were blown away. The only reason I didn’t stay in sales was that they drank a lot of alcohol at the lunches. It was like two, three-martini cocktails at these meetings, which of course is what you did in sales back in those days. I didn’t drink anything. So, they would have to call ahead and have my stuff ready. And the waiter would know that he should give me a martini glass and put some water or soda in it. It became too much.” So, she tried her hand at production and, she says, “That’s kind of where I’ve been for the last 45 years.”
One of her first projects was a public-affairs show. “I first worked on a show called 1672, and it was the station’s first public affairs show dealing with issues in the African American community, which at the time was sixteen percent of the population,” she says “We went on the air in the spring of 1972. That’s how we got the name 1672.”
During this time, Hart had the opportunity to get to know Gerald S. Lesser, a professor at Harvard University School of Education and chief adviser to the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW, later known as the Sesame Workshop) in the development of content for the educational programming included in the children’s television program Sesame Street. Hart soon became interested in children’s television and enrolled in the master’s degree program with Lesser as her adviser. Her thesis was on television and social policy. “I just loved working with Gerry Lesser,” she says. “It was a wonderful experience because of him.”
After completing the program, Hart had the opportunity to work in children’s programming. She did a series for Group W named Call It Macaroni and a series with PBS titled Rebop with her longtime friend and one-time manager Topper Carew, who created the show. “I wanted to do this because I was a young mom, and I had a child who was starting to watch TV,” she says. “To me, it just made a lot of sense.”
Hart also did a show for WBZ called Coming Together, a public affairs program focused on African American issues. “When Bob Johnson’s BET network came on the air, he needed original programming. He knew me and had a relationship with people from Group W. So, he picked up Coming Together and it was probably the first original content Black show on BET,” recalls Hart, who interviewed numerous celebrities on this show under BET. She went to Los Angeles for the first show and she ended up with boxing legend Muhammad Ali as her first guest. The show was able to book celebrities, especially the many who came through Boston on tour, and celebrity interviews were always a component of the show, though she continued to do public affairs topics.
“I had also gone to Africa to work with a friend, the late Valerie Whitmore, on a documentary called Dark Passages. It aired on BET during Black History Month in 1990,” says Hart. “Right after that, I got a call from Bob and he said, ‘You know, I don’t know if you’d even think about this, but I want to start a west coast operation, and I know that you could lead it. You could handle that.’ I said, ‘I probably could. [But] I don’t know if I want to do that.’”
One of the things she knew she would miss would be the proximity to Martha’s Vineyard. When the Harts were living in Boston, they wanted a way for the family to get away to a different world without going far. They first took the 69-mile journey to Martha’s Vineyard in 1971 and knew that it would be their home away from home. They have been going there regularly since, although making the trip became more complicated when they moved to California. But they come as often as they can. They have owned several properties on the Vineyard for the past 36 years.
In a small way, the Vineyard reminds Tanya Hart of home. “There was a similar place in Michigan when I was growing up called Idlewild,” she explains “Of course, it went down quite a bit, but they are trying to bring that back.”
She thinks of Martha’s Vineyard as the Athens of America: “You’ve got great minds and great people who have been going there for a long time.” One thing that endears her to the island is knowing that when they came there in 1971, there had been a large Black community there for 150 years. She notes two things that have changed over the years. One is that when she first went to California, “Most of these folks out here didn’t know where Martha’s Vineyard is; now they are all here. The other thing is a population shift. “When we bought our first house in Edgartown, which had been incorporated in 1614, we were, interestingly enough, only the second Black family to buy there, and that was in the 1980s,” she recalls. “But now, that’s where all the Black people go. Everybody’s buying in Edgartown now.”
Eventually, though, she and BET CEO Bob Johnson worked out a two-year contract and she was L.A.-bound in September of 1990. Six weeks later, she says BET had “built four walls, a building, hired a staff of about 75 to 100 people, built sets and went on the air with my show in October. “After that, the rest is history,” she says.
The Entertainment Industry Still Has Work to Do
Even now, Hollywood is difficult for the Black press and Black publicists to navigate. According to Hart, it’s all about access.
“There’s been a big thing here in Hollywood because we, the Black press, had to go after the studios because we were not being included in things that we should have been included in,” she explains. “And then all of a sudden the white shows, like ‘Access Hollywood,’ realized that they would get a better audience if they started going after all the Black celebrities and we had to compete for them. And we were still being ignored. This has been going on for 20 years,” she says.
“Now, the Black publicists and the Black press have been working together more, but it works best when Black celebrities and other power holders help us,” she says. “People like Ava DuVernay and Cassandra Butcher. They always set us up. The Black publicists, love them, and they have always looked out for the Black press and made sure that we were included. It hasn’t been easy for them, because the studios would push back on them. But they stood fast. They stood by us, and we stood by them. That’s kind of why we’re all still here, to tell you the truth.”
She’s also optimistic about the future of the industry for African Americans. “It’s like getting out of mud; it’s difficult to move forward,” she says. “But, in general, the state of Black Hollywood is in a good place right now. It seems like there are a lot of opportunities. There are a lot of new Black directors. People are getting deals with networks. Look at Regina King and Tessa Thompson just got a big deal from HBO. Five years ago, somebody like Tessa Thompson who’s done well in some big movies, still would not have gotten that kind of deal. And then I have to, of course, mention the great [Hollywood publicist Rosalind “Roz” Stevenson, who was one of the first and set everybody up. Then she put people in the business that would not have ever had their own business had it not been for her.”
She Sings, Too
Hart can do magic with a mic, using it for interviews and commentaries. It turns out that she also can use the mic to sing. She has recorded a CD, Tanya Hart Sings that was originally released in 2005 and is currently available on Amazon, Spotify, CD Baby, and other music platforms. It’s not just a lark — Hart has been singing for many years with a couple of bands that she formed. She has even taken classes at the famed New England Conservatory of Music. “I was always a singer,” she says. “I grew up in Michigan during the Motown era.”
But her genre of choice is jazz. “I did a lot of jazz in Boston,” she recalls. “I did clubs. I sang with Freddie Hubbard when he would come to town. I sang with Dizzy Gillespie once, which was a great thing. And when folks would come into town and they would need a singer, I would get calls.”
Her music performances haven’t all been jazz, however. “I had a ten-piece rock band, and those are the folks that you will hear on Tanya Hart Sings,” she says. “And I also hooked up with Christopher Brooks, who was Cab Calloway’s grandson, and we had a group and recorded some things.” She said that her CD has been selling pretty well. “Some people in Europe and Asia found it, and it started selling over there,” she notes.
Radio Is Here to Stay — With a Caveat
Hart feels good about the future of Black radio. “Radio still matters to Black people,” she says. “The research shows that we still get most of our news and information from radio. And worldwide, more people have [access to] radio shows than TV shows or computers or cell phones,” she says. “So, radio is still big. I’ve been to Africa several times. And, you go through those villages, and even in the bigger towns, you’re not seeing folks watching TV, but you hear the radio blasting.”
But she believes that those who have been able to cross over into the digital space will fare much better. She says that AURN’s digital platform is quite robust now and that’s a great thing. “I think radio will last, and it will continue to be the space where African Americans feel comfortable and know that they get the truth. Because, right now,” she notes, “the whole idea of telling the truth has just been assaulted in such a huge way.”
Hart says that she is inspired by God, who also keeps her spiritually grounded. And the inspiration she offers for young people who want to get into this field is this: “First of all, the world is wide open to you. The Internet changed things and provides more opportunities. But the bottom line is that you must love what you’re doing. You must be willing to sacrifice. Because it’s not going to be easy, and people are generally still going to tell you ‘No.’ If you’re passionate about your project, whatever that is, that comes through, and that’s the thing that people pick up on. It’s the passion within you that people will see, and that will guide you.”
To learn more about Hollywood Live with Tanya Hart on American Urban Radio Networks, click here.
To view the video playlist of Joe Madison, Karen Hunter, and Tanya Hart radio interviews, click here.
Christy DeBoe Hicks is a communications consultant, writer, and editor with more than 30 years of experience working with policy, nonprofit, education, and community organizations, as well as in the music, theater, and publishing fields. After a hiatus, she has returned as a regular contributor to Global Communicator.
