Rick Dees
American radio personality

Rigdon Osmond Dees III (born March 14, 1950), best known as Rick Dees, is an American radio personality, best known for his internationally syndicated radio show The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown and for the 1976 satirical novelty song "Disco Duck". He is also known as the source of the audio in the 2002 "You Are An Idiot" trojan, which originated from a comedy sketch on his 1984 album Put It Where the Moon Don’t Shine. Dees is a People's Choice Award recipient, a Grammy-nominated performing artist, and Broadcast Hall of Fame inductee. He performed the title song for the film Meatballs. He co-founded the E. W. Scripps television network Fine Living, now the Cooking Channel, and has hosted Rick Dees in the Morning at KIIS-FM and KHHT in Los Angeles. Today he continues his own syndicated daily radio show, Daily Dees and the syndicated Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown. He is also the voice announcer on the network Rewind TV.
Early life
Dees was born Rigdon Osmond Dees III in Jacksonville, Florida, on March 14, 1950. He was raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. Dees graduated from Greensboro's Grimsley High School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in motion pictures, TV, and radio.
Career
Radio
Dees began his radio career at a Greensboro radio station called WGBG while still in high school.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rick Dees” is american radio personality. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rick, Dees and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american radio personality” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q721977. VIAF identifies the subject as 90649700. The Library of Congress control number is n91053833. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1976, 2002 and 1984.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Rick Dees”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Rick Dees primary sources, Rick Dees archive and Rick research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rick Dees”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Rick Dees” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.