Donnie Dee is from San Antonio, Texas. He started DJing in 1992 and began professionally doing this in 2005. Throughout his career he has won many awards including the DMC’s and the Red Bull Thr3style. In his spare time, he enjoys practicing DJing, listening to music, sneakers, and traveling.
His first experience with Jazz was with his family. Jazz music was always on and around his mom’s and grandmother’s house alongside R&B of the late 60’s to the early 90’s. His mom, grandmother, and aunt helped shape his music taste to this day. Donnie believes listening to Jazz music opened his mind to many different kinds of music.
Donnie has always been big into college radio. He started listening to KRTU in 2002 or 2003. He was invited to be on a hip-hop show that was airing in 2005 and was invited back the next week. Darby and Rob G. ran a show called Labkids radio on Sunday night. He joined this show as well. The music director at the time, Matt Fleager, offered Donnie a Saturday night time slot from 9-10pm. This is when Donnie created Super Soul Saturday, a show “geared towards more soul driven music”.
At first, Donnie played acts like the Gorillaz, Flying Lotus, and Lo-fi instrumentals, but then Matt Fleager suggested he lean into “more of what Hip-Hop music was sampled from.” Then Scuba Steve, the co-host, joined a month later and the show took off. The show is strictly focused on Soul, Neo Soul, and classic R&B, though sometimes a hip-hop cut may be thrown into the mix. Donnie mainly talks about the artists, the samples or local events during his show. The last 20 minutes of every show is usually modern soul along the lines of Erykah, Badu, Madlib, and Thundercat. Donnie has shared a sample of these last 20 minutes here. The two co-hosts along with JJ Lopez created a quarterly Soul Live event called the Super Soul Shakedown. They play cuts they would play on air in person and many artists are brought down for that event. Hopefully they can start these events up again soon!
“I think KRTU's future is in good hands and there is no sign of them stopping. Hopefully I can hang in there with them for as long as I can. The community embraces them because they embrace the community.” - Donnie Dee