The Women's Music Hour

The Deadly Nightshade press photo

The Women’s Music Hour was in fact a WXPN-Philadelphia series and not a WBAI show. The episode in this collection was specifically recorded on October 7, 1976 and features guest interviewees Pamela (Pam) Brandt and Helen Hooke, two-thirds of the early all-female feminist rock band The Deadly Nightshade. The third member of the group, Anne Bowen, was absent from this interview. In the mid 1970s, The Deadly Nightshade was signed to RCA and the band is often cited as being one of the first “women’s liberation” bands to get a major-label record deal.

While the host of this 1976 episode does not name herself, later known hosts and producers for The Women’s Music Hour at WXPN include Laney Goodman, who spent over eight years on WXPN-FM in Philadelphia, where she hosted shows as diverse as The Women’s Music Hour and Roots of Jazz, as well as Michaela Majoun, who took over The Women’s Music Hour show after Goodman and who eventually folded it into her daily morning programming gig.