I Am Woman
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"I Am Woman" is a song cowritten by Helen Reddy and singer/songwriter/guitarist Ray Burton and performed by Reddy. Released in its most well-known version in 1972, the song became an enduring anthem for the women’s liberation movement.
The song reached No.1 on the Billboard charts in October 1972. It was the first No.1 in the Billboard chart by an Australian artist and the first Australian-penned song to win a Grammy Award (in her acceptance speech for Best Female Performance, Reddy famously thanked "God, because She makes everything possible"). It sold more than a million copies, has been played more than a million times on US radio, and helped propel Reddy to a successful pop career which made her more than $40 million in America.
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[edit] Inspiration for the song
After securing a recording contract in 1971 with Capitol Records that yielded the hit "I Don’t Know How To Love Him", Reddy – then living in Los Angeles -- was asked for an album. She gave the label a set of 10 jazz-tinged pop songs. Nestled among the Leon Russell, Graham Nash and Van Morrison songs were two Reddy originals. "I Am Woman" was one of them. The composition was the result of Reddy’s search for a song that would express her growing passion for female empowerment. In a 2003 interview in Australia’s Sunday Magazine (published with the Sunday Herald Sun and Sunday Telegraph), she explained:
| “ | I couldn't find any songs that said what I thought being a 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.
The only songs were 'I Feel Pretty' or that dreadful song 'Born A Woman'." (The 1966 hit by Sandy Posey had 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".) These are not exactly empowering lyrics. I certainly never thought of myself as a songwriter, but it came down to having to do it. |
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Reddy’s own long years on stage had also fuelled her contempt for males who belittled women, she said. "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."
Reddy credits the song as having supernatural inspiration. She said: "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." Pressed on who had chosen her, she replied: "The universe." The next day she wrote the lyric and handed it to Australian guitarist Ray Burton to put it to music.
[edit] Collaboration with Ray Burton
Burton, 26 at the time and playing in Los Angeles with Australian rock band The Executives, was a friend who had often worked with Reddy in live venues across Australia. He has a different recollection of the song's beginning. He told Sunday Magazine he spoke to Reddy after she attended a series of regular women's meetings at which he says they would "sit around and whinge about their boyfriends".
| “ | I said to Helen, 'If you're so serious about the whole thing, why don't you jot down some lyrics and I'll make it a song?' And that's pretty much what happened. She gave me lyrics scribbled down on a piece of paper and I went home that Sunday night and wrote the whole song in about three hours. Her lyrics were more in poetic form, so I rewrote a few bits of it. I had a bit of a melody in my head anyway, so I reconstructed it, moulded the lyrics to fit that melody. I did a demo on reel-to-reel tape. She really liked it and she recorded it. It's not one of my better songs. I had commerciality in mind because I knew the women's lib thing was going on. I figured it was a way to make a few bucks. I thought it was bound to be a hit. Then it went on the album and just sat there and I thought, 'Well, maybe I was wrong'. | ” |
Reddy insists Burton didn't change a word of the lyrics. Yet she admits she had no expectations for the track. More than a year later, however, the song was picked to run behind the opening credits of Stand Up And Be Counted, a lightweight Hollywood women's lib comedy starring Jacqueline Bisset, Loretta Swit and Steve Lawrence. On the strength of this, Capitol decided to release the song as a single. Because in its initial form I Am Woman ran to little more than two minutes, Reddy was asked to write an additional verse and chorus. The extra verse inserted the song's only reference to males ("Until I make my brother understand"). More importantly, the new version would add significant punch to a song that, in its initial form, was simple, bouncy and unconfronting.
[edit] The recording session
Reddy told Sunday Magazine she remembered nothing of the second recording session and did not know which musicians played on the song. In fact, she had one of the best line-ups in LA backing her. The twanging guitar that opens the song was provided by Mike Deasy, whose CV boasts sessions with The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, The Fifth Dimension and Frank Sinatra. Jim Horn, who had played on The Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," was on woodwind. The drummer was Jim Gordon, whose credits included The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and John Lennon's "Imagine". On piano was Michael Melvoin, who had probably played on more Monkees songs than any of the Monkees. There was also Joe Osborn (bass), who had recorded with Billy Joel; Dick "Slide" Hyde (trombone) was a veteran of sessions with Glen Campbell and Bread; and longtime Buddy Rich band member Don Menza played sax. Backing vocals were by Kathy Deasy, whose voice graces records by Johnny Rivers, Kenny Loggins and The Byrds.
According to Mike Deasy, the session, at Sun West Studio on Hollywood Boulevard, was neither typical nor cheerful. Producer Jay Senter quit as soon as the track was complete, allegedly because he could not tolerate the attitude of Reddy’s famously hot-tempered husband, Jeff Wald. Deasy told Sunday Magazine:
| “ | The problem wasn't Jay or Helen. It was Jeff. He brought in his pushy New York energy, yelling and screaming. We did that one song and Jay said, 'Forget it', and walked out. We were so used to working together as a band, we did three or four sessions a day, six days a week. We'd walk in, listen to the song and play it better than anyone else could. We had a system that worked. Jeff walked in and started telling us what he thought was supposed to happen. | ” |
[edit] The song’s impact
As the single was released, Wald – who had worked the phones for 18 hours a day when her first single was released, urging radio stations to play it – once more put his formidable promotional skills to use. He won gigs for Reddy - by now heavily pregnant with son Jordan - to sing on 19 TV talk and variety shows, which in turn triggered phone calls from female viewers to radio stations begging them to play it. "It was through television that we forced them to play it," said Reddy. And as radio played it, women bought it, driving the song higher in the charts until it hit No.1 on December 9, 1972, the week Reddy gave birth. "It was my first No.1," said Reddy, "and it was the first No.1 Capitol Records had in five years. They were chuffed."
In the year that Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine was launched in the US and Cleo in Australia, the song quickly captured the imagination of the burgeoning women's movement. National Organisation of Women founder Betty Friedan was later to write that in 1973, a gala entertainment night in Washington DC at the NOW annual convention closed with the playing of "I Am Woman". "Suddenly," she said, "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, women really moving as women."
To Reddy, the song's message reaches beyond feminism. "It's not just for women," she said. "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 played it every morning just to get him going."
The song brought greater exposure to Reddy, paving the way for a succession of hit singles. It also generated tremendous wealth, which the couple flaunted with a gaudy lifestyle of mansions, limousines, jewellery and speedboats. In her tell-all Hollywood book, You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, Julia Phillips claimed that by the time the couple completed their acrimonious divorce in 1982 they had blown most of the $40 million they had made. When Reddy’s performance of the song at the 1981 Miss World contest infuriated feminists, she responded: "Let them step forward and pay my rent and I'll stay home. What I'm doing is advertising a product I wouldn't use."
[edit] Fallout with Burton
Expelled from the US in 1971 because of work-permit problems, Ray Burton was forced to watch the song's stellar rise in the US from a distance. Things became so bad he was forced to live on unemployment benefits. "It could have been the launching pad for a writing and singing career," he said. "They took advantage of the fact I wasn't there."
He claimed he was forced to take legal action against the singer in 1998 to recover a portion of songwriter royalties that had been withheld from him since 1972. He said: "I got some money out of it, but nothing like it would have been in the '70s when it was riding high."
Reddy disputes Burton's claims. "There was a buyout 25 or 30 years ago," she told Sunday Magazine. "Neither of us had any idea the song would become what it became. About 10 years ago he got in touch with me because he was in financial difficulties. I felt sorry for him and reinstated his songwriter royalties. His passport problems ended any hope he had of a career in the States and somehow that bitterness got transferred to me. I wish him well. I bear him no animosity."
Today he performs again in venues on the Queensland Gold Coast, where he lives. Sometimes he includes it in his set, raising a laugh from audiences by saying, "Here's a song I wrote in the '70s, with a twist." He sings it as, "She is woman, hear her roar".
[edit] Enduring popularity
Interest in the song has been revived by its use in the 1997 Julia Roberts film My Best Friend’s Wedding and a Jessica Williams dance version from a 1999 film, Trick. It was covered by The Dan Band on their CD The Dan Band Live and also inspired a one-hour music special by the group, Dan Finnerty & The Dan Band: I Am Woman. It has been used in TV commercials for a sports footwear chain and a female-oriented cable TV network, but a pitch about 2003 by Coors beer ("with a gigantic amount of money," Reddy says) was rebuffed. "I'm not in the drug-dealing business," she says. "I don't care how much money they offer me." For some years Reddy tired of talking about the song, frustrated that out of her 35-year music career it was all the media remembered her for. In recent years a hint of revisionism has crept in, prompted by the discovery that her lyrics had been included in history textbooks in US schools. Reddy, who says her singing career is over, last performed the song in October 2002, using it to conclude a world farewell concert in Edmonton. It was an emotional night. "I had no idea what the song was destined to become," she said. "If I'd known, I would have been far too intimidated to have written it."
In 2006, Burger King reworked the lyrics for a commercial titled "Manthem" extolling the virtues of large burgers over small "chick food" plates. [1] [2]
| Preceded by "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" by The Temptations |
Billboard Hot 100 number one single December 9, 1972 |
Succeeded by "Me and Mrs. Jones" by Billy Paul |
