Remembering Radio Host Patrick Ellis, Who Brought The ‘Gospel Spirit’ To D.C.

VPM | By Sarah McCammon and Sophia Alvarez Boyd

Published July 26, 2020 at 11:45 AM EDT

Updated December 27, 2023

Patrick Ellis worked at Howard University radio station for over 40 years. "He would play music that touched him," says one colleague. "He would play music that he knew touched his audience."

For more than 40 years, 96.3 WHUR-FM broadcast Patrick Ellis’s beloved and popular radio show Gospel Spirit Sunday mornings, filling the homes and cars of Washington, D.C., with the sound of church.

Each Sunday, Ellis chose music that would inspire, uplift and speak to his devoted listeners. And he filled the airwaves with their lives, too, sharing community and church announcements and marking birthdays, anniversaries and special occasions.

Patrick Ellis passed away July 16 from complications of the coronavirus. He was 77 years old.

Jacquie Gales Webb was a longtime colleague of Patrick Ellis at WHUR. She says Gospel Spirit was “everything that the faith community needed to hear as they prepared to go to their services.”

“Over the 40 years, so many generations of not only African Americans, but all cultures within the Washington metropolitan area listened to Patrick Ellis and made listening to him their Sunday morning ritual,” she says.

Listen to her remembrance in the audio player above, and we should note that Jacquie Gales Webb is the vice president of radio for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of NPR’s funding.

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Sarah McCammon

Sarah McCammon is a National Correspondent covering the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast for NPR. Her work focuses on political, social and cultural divides in America, including abortion and reproductive rights, and the intersections of politics and religion. She's also a frequent guest host for NPR news magazines, podcasts and special coverage.

During the 2016 election cycle, she was NPR's lead political reporter assigned to the Donald Trump campaign. In that capacity, she was a regular on the NPR Politics Podcast and reported on the GOP primary, the rise of the Trump movement, divisions within the Republican Party over the future of the GOP and the role of religion in those debates.

Prior to joining NPR in 2015, McCammon reported for NPR Member stations in Georgia, Iowa and Nebraska, where she often hosted news magazines and talk shows. She's covered debates over oil pipelines in the Southeast and Midwest, agriculture in Nebraska, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in Iowa and coastal environmental issues in Georgia.

McCammon began her journalism career as a newspaper reporter. She traces her interest in news back to childhood, when she would watch Sunday-morning political shows – recorded on the VCR during church – with her father on Sunday afternoons. In 1998, she spent a semester serving as a U.S. Senate Page.

She's been honored with numerous regional and national journalism awards, including the Atlanta Press Club's "Excellence in Broadcast Radio Reporting" award in 2015. She was part of a team of NPR journalists that received a first-place National Press Club award in 2019 for their coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack.

McCammon is a native of Kansas City, Mo. She spent a semester studying at Oxford University in the U.K. while completing her undergraduate degree at Trinity College near Chicago.

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