Delilah (radio host)

Delilah Rene (born February 15, 1960, North Bend, Oregon) is an American radio personality, author, and songwriter, best known as the host of a nationally syndicated nightly U.S. radio song request and dedication program, with an estimated 8 million listeners. Although she first aired in the Seattle market as "Delilah Rene", she is now known mononymously as Delilah.

The show, known simply as Delilah begins at 7pm and ends around midnight local time. She takes calls from listeners in her home studio, providing encouragement, support, and receiving musical dedication requests. It is based in the Pacific Northwest.

One of the cornerstones of the show is its use of callers. Most of the time the caller tells Delilah their situation or story and then she chooses the song that she feels best matches the caller's situation. Callers are recorded during the show and replayed later, sometimes within the hour during the show. She also plays songs by direct request.

Originally heard only on weeknights, stations that carry the show have the option of doing so six or even seven nights a week, with most stations doing so at least one night of the weekend (usually Sunday) in addition to the weeknight show.

The show includes "Friday Nite Girls", a "fan club"-style feature in which she honors groups of her regular female listeners with prizes. She occasionally also calls certain "Friday Nite Girls" chapters and speaks with them live on the air. She also airs a "Delilah Dilemma" each evening in the first and third hours of the broadcast.

The program debuted on four stations at the beginning of 1996, finishing the year on a dozen stations. In 1997, Broadcast Programming started to distribute the program, which was later bought by Jones Radio Networks. Delilah moved to Premiere Radio Networks in 2004, where she remains to this day. There are nearly 170 radio stations, and the Armed Forces Radio Network, airing the program. Jane Bulman is the original executive producer and has been in that role for 20 years.

Many of the stations carrying the show are owned by Premiere parent iHeartMedia. In November 2006, WLTW in New York began carrying her. The version of the show that runs on WLTW is a separate, specially tailored version of the show produced just for that station, with music programmed by local WLTW Programming. In 2007, longtime lovesongs host Zoe Bonet was dropped from KODA Houston and replaced with her. In March 2012, she went on the air in Los Angeles on KFSH-FM, a Salem Broadcasting owned station playing Christian music. This addition debuted the Christian Music formatted version of the program. iHeartRadio has an online Delilah stream where listeners can hear the show all the time regardless of time zone or broadcast market.

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