Dees is a People's Choice Award recipient, a Grammy-nominated performing artist, and Broadcast Hall of Fame inductee.

[1] 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.

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.

The song can be heard in Saturday Night Fever in a brief scene in which a group of older people were learning to "move their feet to the disco beat".

While this platinum recording earned him a People's Choice Award for Favorite New Song,[7] and the BMI Award for record sales in one year[8],[citation needed] Dees was expressly forbidden from playing the song on the air by station management (rival stations refused to play it for fear of promoting their competition).

In a short time, he turned KIIS-FM into the #1 revenue-generating radio station in America, with an asset value approaching half a billion dollars.

[11][page needed] The Weekly Top 40 has been heard each weekend in over 200 countries worldwide and the Armed Forces Radio Network.

Dees returned to Los Angeles radio in August 2006 on KMVN, Movin 93.9, hosting the morning show along with Patti "Long Legs" Lopez and Mark Wong.

He also continues to host the syndicated Daily Dees show, and can be heard in Hawaii on Kohala Radio KNKR 96.1 FM each morning live.

In feature films, Dees starred in La Bamba, portraying the iconic Ted Quillin, the Los Angeles disc jockey who helped launch Ritchie Valens's career.

The trial court found that the parody song, titled "When Sonny Sniffs Glue," was clearly intended to "poke fun" at the style of singing for which Johnny Mathis was well known, and thus was not infringing.