Helen Reddy: Gender Icon

I must admit up front that I’ve never been a fan of Helen Reddy, but then again, I’m a guy.

Men were never the target market—and that point really hit home on this date in 1972, as Helen’s first hit song “I Am Woman” reached #1 on the pop charts. Maybe I felt threatened back then, even at the tender age of 14. The ladies were asserting themselves!

The timing couldn’t have been better, but the messenger was an unlikely one.

The women’s liberation movement had just started to gain momentum—“Ms. Magazine” had recently been launched—but Helen Reddy gave no prior clue that she would be the voice of an entire gender. The “breakthrough” for this young Australian singer came with a cover from the score of “Jesus Christ Superstar”—“I Don’t Know How To Love Him” (hardly a song of female independence!)

Even so, Helen was influenced by the growing women’s lib movement—and set out to write a song that captured its spirit.

Safe to say she succeeded.

Released in the spring of 1972, “I Am Woman” struggled to get airplay---perhaps because most radio stations were programmed by men! It dropped off the Hot 100 chart altogether, but thanks to multiple TV appearances and the subsequent avalanche of requests from women to radio stations, the song found a second life and re-emerged on the chart—a rare feat indeed!

Here’s a clip of Helen Reddy performing her first hit song on the old TV show “Midnight Special” (remember that one!?)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmifO2sKT7g

Helen would go on to have several other hits, including: “Delta Dawn”, “You And Me Against The World”, “Ain’t No Way To Treat A Lady” and “Leave Me Alone(Ruby Red Dress)”. She stated in 2008 that she would never perform in front of another audience, saying that her voice had “deepened to another level”—and she wasn’t sure she could even pull off “Delta Dawn”.

That’s OK—her voice was heard loud and clear in the 70’s, when her gender needed it most. To steal from her lyrics, she is woman—and we definitely heard her roar---to an audience too big to ignore.


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