“Hi!” Delilah says. “Welcome aboard. I’m so glad you found us. If you’re a newcomer to this show, you’re probably wondering what in the world this is all about. Well, it’s not about politics. It’s not about wars going on around the world. It’s not about national trials and tribulations. It’s about you. It’s about your heart. It’s about what in the world is going on in your world. We are here for you—to take your calls about family, friends, sweethearts, that special someone you met over the internet, falling in love, having your heart broken by love, babies, and graduations. And then we mix those stories together with your favorite love songs. Thank you for finding us. You’re listening to Delilah.”
When a caller named Helen mentions having a baby with her fiancé, a soldier who’s stationed in the Middle East, Delilah says, “When are we getting married?”
Helen replies, “We haven’t set a date yet, but we’re going to start planning as soon as he gets home.” Delilah plays Selena’s “Dreaming of You.”
To a young woman who is still stuck on her ex-boyfriend, Delilah says, more than once, “I hate it when that happens.”
Delilah—who, as any icon seeking goddess status must do, goes only by one name—discusses how your kids can drive you crazy, especially during the summer; it’s important, she says, to step back and remember how much you love them.
Kirsten calls and says about her son, “Our little guy’s a special-needs guy.”
“Aren’t we all special needs in one way or another?” Delilah says, before playing Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.”
Delilah advises Kathy, who’s shy about approaching the former security guard she’s in love with, “What happens if you don’t follow through with this and he gets away again? Say ‘Thank you for alerting me to the fact that my headlight was broken. I owe you my life. Here’s a plate of cookies and my phone number at home. And my cell phone and my pager number and my fax number and my email address.’ Come on, Kathy. Shoulders back. Be bold. Be brave.” Then she plays Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.”
Delilah takes five calls and plays about ten songs an hour—adult-contemporary soft rock: Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Jason Aldean, Journey, Foreigner, Sarah Bareilles, Bon Jovi, Cher.
Asked what her three most requested songs are, Delilah responds, “ ‘Wind Beneath My Wings,’ ‘Wind Beneath My Wings,’ ‘Wind Beneath My Wings.’ ”
Delilah, which is recorded live in Delilah’s home studio in the Seattle area and is broadcast up to seven nights a week between seven and midnight in most markets, has eight million listeners on about one hundred forty stations in forty-three states, covering most of the country, even though the show isn’t on in several major cities, such as Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Many of Delilah’s affiliates are number one with women ages twenty-five to thirty-four, including stations in Cleveland, Miami, Boise, and Dallas.
According to Compendia Media, one midwestern law firm had to withdraw its commercial from Delilah’s show because it couldn’t handle the business its ad drummed up. In 2002, fans at a bookstore in Louisville wouldn’t let Delilah leave, even after she’d spent five hours signing copies of her first book, Love Someone Today. Delilah has also released several themed-compilation CDs: My Child, three volumes of Love Someone, The Wedding Collection, and Love Someone at Christmas. In 2008, she released the book Love Matters: Remarkable Love Stories That Touch the Heart and Nourish the Soul. When she endorsed Bissell vacuum cleaners in 2000, Bissell outlets across the country were besieged by customers. Bob Carlisle’s father-daughter ballad, “Butterfly Kisses,” was getting very little airplay except on Christian radio; in 1997, Delilah put the song into heavy rotation, causing the album to go double platinum.
Dick Fennessy, onetime program director for WFPG in Atlantic City, says that Delilah had an “unbelievable” impact on his station when he worked there: “In every female demographic, we doubled the numbers. We were number one in women twenty-five to thirty-four and number one in thirty-five to sixty-four. Need I say more?” The show gets a hundred thousand call-in attempts and more than a thousand email messages a night; three hundred calls get through to a screener; twenty-five calls make it on the air.
Who are these people, and why are they all calling Delilah?
“Every one of our affiliate stations was established and exists to reach women twenty-five to fifty-four,” Delilah says. “I have mammary glands. I lost a grandmother to breast cancer. My executive producer”—Jane Bulman—“has two sisters who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. We’re single parents. We understand the frustration of having to get up at three a.m. because your child is puking their guts out, plus you have to fix breakfast at seven for the other kids, get them to school, take care of the pets, and get yourself to work. We shop at Target and Walmart. Janey and I are that audience.” Delilah lives “the remote-location farm life” on forty-nine acres in South Kitsap, near Puget Sound.
Delilah says that she’s the anti–Howard Stern; she’s also the anti–Rush Limbaugh, extremely female in a male-dominated medium and genre. Reyn Leutz, onetime senior partner at MindShare, which bought advertising on Delilah for Sears, Kimberly-Clark, and other blue-chip accounts, says that many of their clients were looking to reach women in a medium that tends to skew male. Premiere Radio Networks’ online media kit claims that Delilah is the “most-listened-to woman on the radio.”
Delilah’s listeners are overwhelmingly female, modestly educated, and as much as I can judge from listening to the show for a couple of months, politically middle of the road. She also said that “it seems as if half my callers are single moms.” Unlike, say, Oprah (who had twenty-one million viewers a week), Delilah only infrequently accompanies the sugar pill with harsh-tasting medicine.
To a young man ambivalent about continuing a relationship with a woman because he doesn’t want the responsibility of caring for her two young children, Delilah posts this message on her website: “She deserves far better than you have to offer, I am afraid. She deserves a man who has a spine—a man who is not afraid of the challenges that lie ahead and who will stick around when the going gets tough. Someone who will love those babies as his flesh and blood, not a child in a man’s body who says one thing one minute and then changes his mind the next. You are playing with her heart, and with the hearts of two very precious children. God warns us that it would be better for a person to have a millstone tied around their neck and be thrown into a lake than to hurt a child. You are hurting two children.” This admonition seems to have been written with not only her addressee but also an ex-husband in mind, one with whom (as Delilah suggested to me when I interviewed her) she has had a less-than-amicable relationship.
On air, she says, “If you’re a parent, love your children. If you’re married, honor your spouse instead of looking on the internet for love in all the wrong places. I’m talking about real relationships, not false intimacies. To show love for people—that’s what the show is about.” Each caller is, briefly, famous, her solitary life turned into a national narrative. Girls’ night out, lonely hearts club, universal pain association. Delilah is a relentless valentine for and about the struggling class, a trump card for those holding an empty hand. Delilah offers the possibility of ordinary American female life redeemed by…by what? The sugar rush of over-the-moon sentiment. In five hours at her house one day, I ate pancakes and syrup for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for an afternoon pick-me-up. The hungry heart will be cured by sweetness itself. Delilah wants every call to end on an “audio hug” of empathy and recognition, and it does, it does. Inevitably she lifts us up where we belong—where the eagles fly, etc.—even as her own life remains obdurately earthbound.
“I made just about every mistake a person could make before God came into my heart,” Delilah told me. “If some of those painful experiences can help someone avoid the same mistakes I made, then perhaps my heartache was not totally in vain.”
Delilah Rene Luke, the second of four children, was born in North Bend, Oregon, on February 15, 1960. When I asked if, as a divorced mother of twelve, she attached any symbolism to being born one day after Valentine’s Day—missed it by that much?—she shrugged and said that the only significance is that if she’d been born a day earlier, she would have been named Valerie. In seventh grade, she won a speech contest by reciting the Gettysburg Address. The judges of the contest owned the local radio station, and she soon had her own show, Delilah Luke, on the Warpath—school news and sports. In high school she had a part-time position at the station, writing and reading afternoon newscasts. After working as a DJ and newscaster on two small stations in Eugene, Oregon, she moved to Seattle, where she did traffic, rock, and jazz. She worked for stations in Boston, Philadelphia, and Rochester, then in 1996 started doing Delilah After Dark. The show was originally broadcast in three cities and expanded to more than two hundred in four years.
A caller named Jan says, “Thank you for allowing the world to know that music has no color. I appreciate that.”
Delilah knows what Jan means, but she plays dumb: “Music has a myriad of colors, actually. It’s passionate reds and bright yellows and bluesy blues.”
Jan: “Let me rephrase that. When I say ‘color,’ I mean—”
Delilah: “Prejudice?”
Delilah is white; most of her children—three biological, nine adopted—have African American, African, or Hispanic ancestry. She’s thrice-divorced.
In 1982, when she brought her African American husband home to meet her parents, her father “freaked out and jumped up and ran to the gun closet. He chased me off with a shotgun.” Her father disowned her, and when he was dying, he refused to allow her to visit.
By 1986, Delilah and her first husband had divorced. (“He was the love of my life I will love until I die,” she told me. “He’s charismatic and sexy and sweet, and we had a wonderful love.” Delilah worried about his capacity to stay faithful.) Her brother, Matthew Mark Luke, and his wife had died in a plane crash. She had been fired from a radio station. She said that one night she thought, God, if You exist, I need to know; the next day, when she went shopping, she found something stuck beneath the windshield wiper of her car. “I got nearer and saw that tucked under my wiper was a tiny book—a Bible. Inside someone had written, ‘Jesus Loves You.’ ”
She views her success as divinely inspired: “It is because of God’s faith in me that my show is successful. It is the only reason that my show is successful. God wants people to know that He is real, that He cares, that He listens. He wants people to experience the deep joy that comes from an intimate relationship with Him.”
A disproportionately high percentage of callers are raising two or three children without the father, who has left or was never there. Asked what kind of man she’s attracted to, Delilah says, “You’ve got to be quick, bright, funny—and a mass murderer. I could walk into a crowd of five thousand men and pick out the two biggest jerks. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d pick out a guy that would break my heart. Because my father was so passionate and smart and so brilliant and so emotionally not available—that, I guess, is what I’m attracted to.” Delilah and the show are father-fixated, redressing the absent or dead or distant father by positing an all-knowing, all-loving God.
Delilah embodies the ambivalence her audience feels toward competing definitions of being female. Her voice is half-tease, half-hug, which is what she looks like: ex-bombshell/mother of the year. When I met her, she was wearing a low-cut blouse, which emphasized her décolletage, but she tended to pull up her blouse and cross her arms over her chest. Espousing self-esteem to her listeners, she nevertheless confided to Bulman, “My legs are the only part of myself I like.” In most photos, she appears to be an all-American blonde, but she frequently reminds her listeners that her hair color comes from Kmart.
Donna calls to say, “Unfortunately, not long after my daughter Cassandra was born, her dad decided he didn’t want the responsibility and left. Needless to say, I was devastated and didn’t know what to do, but my mom was there for me. She helped me get through the roughest time in my life. She was my voice, my shrink; she was my everything.” She is always everything to everybody; he is inevitably null and void. If Delilah offers feminism lite/feminism late, it needs to do so in an extremely traditional, even conservative context, so it tucks its delinquent-dad demolition into an ode to family.
When I asked Delilah whether she thinks of herself and the show as feminist, she replied, “I don’t consider myself a feminist, and I don’t consider myself not a feminist. I am a woman who works hard. I am a woman who deserves the same opportunities as any other person who is trying to make it in this business. The fact that I don’t have a penis should not mean that I don’t have the same opportunities, or that I should put up with prejudice or obstacles. It is a shame that I work in a format that is for and about women, and yet it is controlled almost completely by men, and women have little, if any, input. I am not a feminist in that I don’t subscribe to a lot of their philosophies. I believe abortion is killing an unborn child.”
Bulman responded to the same question by saying, “Delilah and I have many different political views but always a common goal. The Delilah show is, without a doubt, pro-woman. We want this show to make women—and men—feel better about themselves.”
In Love Someone Today, Delilah writes, “I had romantic notions playing in my head of a midnight dance under the spectacular sky. I found him”—her last husband, when they were still married—“sleeping soundly in our bed. (He is less friendly when he is sleeping.) I tried to wake him. After several unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and walked out. I felt angry and rejected, my feelings hurt that he wouldn’t jump up and enjoy my romantic fantasy with me. I zipped up my coat and headed out to the backyard again. I stood there, frozen in the beauty of the moment, yet still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I uttered a small prayer of praise, thanking the Almighty for this wonderful scene. And then, in a voice that was so clear it was almost audible, I heard God speak to my heart. ‘I didn’t create this moment for you and Doug,’ He seemed to say. ‘I created it for you and me.’ And together we danced in the moonlight.”
The world is a beautiful place, in other words, but men are oblivious, hopeless; as solace, Delilah presents romantic ballads about idealized lovers, narratives about children as cherubim, praise hymns about our Lord, our Father.
Mary calls to reminisce: “Mama’s Nativity had a music box in it that played ‘Silent Night,’ but it was very old. I think she bought it before she and my father met. Some of the chimes were broken, so our ‘Silent Night’ was very strange, but we all liked it.”
Delilah laughs and says, “It was nearly silent.”
Mary says, “No, it wasn’t nearly silent. It just was—you missed a lot of the melody and you got a lot of the accompaniment, and it just made it very unusual. My dad did woodworking as a hobby. One summer he got a catalogue that had music boxes, so he ordered a ‘Silent Night.’ Without telling anybody, he got out the Nativity scene, changed the music box, and threw away the old broken music box.”
Delilah: “And it was never the same.”
Mary: “And it’s still not the same. Every one of us can still sing that old ‘Silent Night’ that played on that music box for so many years. When we wound it up and heard that it was correct, we all just really attacked him. He didn’t know. He thought he was doing us a favor. And we were like, ‘Oh, Daddy! How could you do that to us?’ But we all still can sing that ‘Silent Night,’ that unusual version of it.”
Delilah: “Let me hear it.”
Mary: “Well, there’s no words, but…” She hums the tune.
Once, a long time ago, something happened. It’s never been the same since. It was Dad’s fault. We’ll forgive him and sort of not forgive him. What sustains us is religion and ritual and the broken music box, which Dad inevitably tries to fix and isn’t fixable and is us.