Nothing in her professional credentials suggested the Australian pop singer Helen Reddy as a feminist icon prior to 1972. Shed made her way to the United States from her native Australia on her own to pursue stardom, and shed paid her dues working on the periphery of the music business for a number of years before making a breakthrough. Yet when that breakthrough came, it was in the form of a 1971 cover version of I Dont Know How To Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar — hardly a song about womens liberation. But a feminist icon is exactly what Helen Reddy would become the very next year, when the anthem-to-be I Am Woman charged up the pop charts, reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1972 — 42 years ago. With lyrics that could have been lifted straight from the pages of the recently launched Ms. magazine, I Am Woman took the message of personal empowerment being espoused by the second-wave feminists of the early 1970s and put it out where it could do some real consciousness-raising — on the same AM airwaves that had been sending out very different messages about gender relations for many years. For a generation of American women raised on songs like Johnny Angel, Its My Party and Will You Love Me Tomorrow, I Am Woman represented something almost entirely new in mainstream pop: A song about female identity that made virtually no reference to men. Helen Reddy wrote the lyrics to I Am Woman out of frustration. I was looking for songs that reflected the positive sense of self that I felt Id gained from the womens movement, she told Billboard magazine, [but] I couldnt find any. True to the message of the hit song she would eventually write, I realized that the song I was looking for didnt exist, and I was going to have to write it myself. Released as a single in the spring of 1972, I Am Woman initially sputtered in its attempt to gain a foothold on the pop charts. It had fallen completely off the charts by late that summer, in fact, before re-entering the Hot 100 in September and beginning a steady climb upward thanks to Reddys frequent appearances on television that fall and to the volume of call-in radio requests those appearances generated — mainly from women. Helen Reddy would have two further #1 hits in the 1970s with Delta Dawn and Angie Baby, but I Am Woman — the only hit song that Reddy penned herself — remains her signature achievement. Here, Reddy performs “I Am Woman.”
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 08:04:14 +0000
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