When her label realized the song had hit potential, the track was re-cut, slowed down a bit and boosted with a brassier arrangement. She’d first cut a shorter, perky version of “I Am Woman” (written with guitarist Ray Burton) on her first album in 1971, and it was revived for a now-forgotten 1972 comedy Stand Up and Be Counted. “All I could find were these awful songs like, ‘I am woman and you are man, I am weak so you can be stronger than,’” she once said, “so I realized the song I was looking for didn’t exist, and I was going to have to write it myself.” Although she’d been active in the women’s movement by then, Reddy, who rarely wrote her own material, said she never located songs that expressed those convictions. In that musical context, anyway, “I Am Woman” seemed to emerge from nowhere. ![]() But before “I Am Woman,” her biggest American hit was a rendition of the lovely but subservient “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar, a song she admitted she wasn’t crazy about but was talked into covering by her manager. Early in her career, she had the good taste to cover songs by cult balladeers Tim Hardin and David Blue. ![]() She’d first made a name for herself on an Australian talent show and then in a series of her own, Helen Reddy Sings, in her native country. Next to them, Reddy felt decidedly old-school. Was “ I Am Woman” pop’s first feminist anthem? Possibly, even if one counts defiant early girl-group barrier-breakers like Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” But nearly 50 years after it first arrived, it’s easy to forget how momentous “I Am Woman” was - and how it set the stage for similar songs and sentiments that are an accepted, everyday part of contemporary pop. Reddy was more of a regular presence on talk and variety shows and in Vegas than at rock clubs.īut sometimes it helps to subvert from within, and such was the case with the song and anthem for which Reddy will be best remembered. ![]() She sang in a smooth timbre that never lost its becalmed manner - call her the anti-Joplin - and most of the Seventies hits for which she’s known (“Delta Dawn,” “No Way to Treat a Lady,” “Angie Baby”) were the essence of the smooth pop that appealed to baby boomers then approaching their settling-down thirties. Helen Reddy, the Australian pop singer who died Tuesday at age 78, was an unlikely pop superhero.
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