Terri Hemmert

Who is Terri Hemmert?

Terri Hemmert is an American radio personality, musicologist, and instructor at Columbia College Chicago. She is a long-term presence at WXRT-FM in Chicago, Illinois where she became the first female drive time host for a rock music station in the Chicago radio market. She is known as an expert on The Beatles and hosts the weekly Breakfast with the Beatles program and has been featured speaker at many Beatles conventions worldwide.

Hemmert grew up in Piqua, Ohio. As a youth she saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and was inspired to set her sights on a career as a disc jockey as a potential way to meet her idols. She maintained her interest in pop and rhythm and blues music through her teens and enrolled at Elmhurst College where she wrote for campus publications and worked at the college radio station WRSE; she received a bachelors degree in Speech in 1970. After a stint as a late-night disc jockey at WCMF in Rochester, New York she returned to the Midwest and, in 1973, joined fledgling progressive rock station WXRT in Chicago as Public Affairs Director and overnight announcer.

Hemmert's career and popularity grew along with that of the station and by 1981 she was the morning drive-time personality for the highly rated station. Hemmert became the regular celebrity host for the Chicago-area Beatle Fest beginning in 1979. Also in the late 1970s she began a long association with Columbia College, where she taught music history and radio classes.