#RIP: Remembering Helen Reddy

Helen Reddy, the hitmaker behind the feminist anthem I Am Woman, died this morning, Tuesday, in Los Angeles. She was 78 years old.

The Australia-born singer released the famous feminist track in 1971. It went to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and became an unofficial anthem for the Women’s Rights movement in the 1970s.

She followed I Am Woman with popular releases including Delta Dawn, Angie Baby, and Ain’t No Way To Treat A Lady.

I am just going to be honest with you, I used to mock this song in my callow youth, but even then, I found it rather irresistible (in an early draft of this post, spellcheck changed it to “irritable”). No matter, it certainly captured the zeitgeist of the 1970s.

Before it became a hit, the only female anthems were I Feel Pretty, I Enjoy Being A Girl, Wives And Lovers, or that dreadful song Born A Woman, a 1966 hit by Sandy Posey that observed that if you’re born a woman: “… you’re born to be stepped on, lied to, cheated on and treated like dirt. I’m glad it happened that way“. Not the most empowering lyrics.

Helen Reddy had no expectations for I Am Woman when she recorded it for her debut album, I Don’t Know How to Love Him, released in Spring 1971:

“It clearly was not hit single material and got no airplay at all. I used it as an opening song whenever I performed live, and it was always well received: I also noticed that the song was being singled out for mention in fan mail.”

More than a year later, the song was chosen for the opening credits of Stand Up And Be Counted, a women’s lib comedy film directed by Jackie Cooper, a man, and starring Stella Stevens, Jacqueline Bisset, Loretta Swit and Steve Lawrence.

The original version ran to little more than two minutes, so Reddy was asked to write an additional verse and chorus for the film; the extra verse inserted the song’s only reference to men: “Until I make my brother understand“.

One of the great and most recognizable anthems of Second-Save American Feminism might not have become a Number One hit without some typical male behavior. Reddy’s manager and then-husband, Jeff Wald, met with an executive at Capitol Records to discuss the song she hoped to record with the label: I Am Woman.

Wald:

Capitol Records said, ‘That women’s lib crap is gonna kill her,’ why are you letting your wife do this stuff?

Wald told the Capitol executive that he and Reddy both believed the song would speak to liberated women of the era. Wald:

He said it was a piece of shit, and that he couldn’t stand it, and that it was going end her career. So, I jumped up on his desk. and I peed on it. And the cocaine had nothing to do with that behavior.

Reddy:

It came to me and it wouldn’t leave me. It was simply a phrase that — over and over, ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman.’ And I thought, well, this has to be a song.

Wald took the single of I Am Woman to a small radio station in Washington DC chosen because it was staffed with so many females. Soon, the station was swamped with requests to hear that song that spoke to women at that moment.

Reddy:

“It was so hard. So hard. You know, so many radio stations would say, ‘Well, we’re already playing a female record’.”

It took a year for I Am Woman to work its way to the top of the charts. It first entered the Billboard Hot 100 at Number 99 and peaked at 97 two weeks later, fell off the Hot 100, re-entered at Number 87 two months later, and then went to Number One at the end of 1972. Reddy won a Grammy for it a few months later. She thanked Wald, “because he makes my success possible“, and then, God: “Because she makes everything possible“.

Referring to God as a woman on national television in 1972 was an audacious move. But it was also the same year that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) passed the Senate and Shirley Chisholm ran for president. The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade just a month after I Am Woman reached Number One, and Paul Anka had just been Number One with Having My Baby (Havin’ my baby/What a lovely way of sayin’ how much you love me).

I Am Woman works as an anthem because it’s so emphatically first person, and yet universal for women.

Reddy:

I couldn’t find any songs that said what I thought being woman was about. I thought about all these strong women in my family who had gotten through the Depression and world wars and drunken, abusive husbands. But there was nothing in music that reflected that.

Reddy had worked on stage, which fueled her contempt for men who belittled women. Reddy:

Women have always been objectified in showbiz. I’d be the opening act for a comic and as I was leaving the stage he’d say, ‘Yeah, take your clothes off and wait for me in the dressing room, I’ll be right there’. It was demeaning and humiliating for any woman to have that happen publicly.

I remember lying in bed one night and the words, ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman’, kept going over and over in my head. That part I consider to be divinely inspired. I had been chosen to get a message across.

I Am Woman was the first Number One single for Capitol Records since Ode To Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry five years earlier, in 1967. It was the first Number One hit on the Billboard chart by an Australian artist and the first Australian-written song to win a Grammy.

Reddy also acted in film and on television, appearing on such shows as The Carol Burnett Show, The Muppet Show and her own short-lived The Helen Reddy Show. She starred in the film Pete’s Dragon (1977) where her song Candle On The Water earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Song. Her role as a nun in Airport 1975 earned her a Golden Globe nomination. She appeared on stage in Blood Brothers on Broadway and in the West End in the 1990s.

National Organization for Woman (NOW) founder Betty Friedan wrote that in 1973, the NOW annual convention closed with the playing of I Am Woman. Friedan:

Suddenly, women got out of their seats and started dancing around the hotel ballroom and joining hands in a circle that got larger and larger until maybe a thousand of us were dancing and singing, ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman.’ It was a spontaneous, beautiful expression of the exhilaration we all felt in those years, woman really moving as woman.

Some feminists took exception to the lyrics: “I’m still an embryo, with a long, long way to go“, somehow identifying the Women’s Movement with pregnancy.

Reddy:

“It’s not just for women. It’s a general empowerment song about feeling good about yourself, believing in yourself. When my former brother-in-law, a doctor, was going to medical school he played it every morning just to get him going.”

Portland’s own Pink Martini performs I Am Woman in concert. Singer China Forbes says she’ll never forget the first time the band performed it:

“All these women came rushing up to the stage. And it was hundreds and hundreds of women. And we all sang I Am Woman together. It was so incredibly powerful that I went from being slightly dubious about singing I Am Woman to addicted to singing the song. It’s so wonderful that a song like that exists, because it’s so galvanizing and empowering that the cheesiness goes away, and you’re just left with this incredible feeling.”

Reddy:

I had no idea what the song was destined to become. If I’d known, I would have been far too intimidated to have written it.

1973, photo via YouTube

Reddy last performed in 2013. She appeared in downtown Los Angeles at the 2017 Women’s March after the inauguration of the mango-hued white nationalist brought out more 750,000 people to the streets. Reddy was introduced by Jamie Lee Curtis and sang an a cappella version of I Am Woman.