| "I Am Woman" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by Helen Reddy | ||||
| from the album I Am Woman | ||||
| B-side | "More Than You Could Take" | |||
| Released | August 1971 | |||
| Format | 7" | |||
| Recorded | 1970 | |||
| Genre | Pop | |||
| Length | 3:04 | |||
| Label | Capitol | |||
| Writer(s) | Ray Burton, Helen Reddy | |||
| Producer | Jay Senter | |||
| Helen Reddy singles chronology | ||||
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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 1970, the song became an enduring anthem for the women’s liberation movement.
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"I am Woman" reached #1 on the Billboard charts in December 1972. The song was the first #1 hit on the Billboard chart by an Australian-born artist and the first Australian-penned song to win a Grammy Award (in her acceptance speech for Best Female Performance, Reddy thanked "God, because She makes everything possible"). It sold more than a million copies, and 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. As an example of the endurance of the song, it was played at the 2010 Academy Awards as the exit music for Kathryn Bigelow after she won the Best Director Oscar for "The Hurt Locker," the first time a woman won the award.
"I am Woman"[1] was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia Registry in 2009.
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),[2] 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. |
” |
Reddy’s own long years on stage had also fueled her contempt for men 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.
Burton, 26 at the time and playing in Los Angeles with Australian rock band The Executives (and later a member of Ayer's Rock), 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 whine 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'.[2] | ” |
Reddy insists Burton didn't change a word of the lyrics.[2] 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 men ("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.
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 some of the best LA session musicians backing her:[2]
The tracking session for "I Am Woman" was extremely difficult. Producer Jay Senter assembled the rhythm section at SunWest Studios for a 7 pm downbeat (start) but since he had planned on tracking without Helen, she was told to arrive until 9 pm. Reddy and Jeff Wald (her former husband) arrived thinking they were going to track when in fact Senter and the band had already recorded "I Am Woman" as well as "Don't Mess With A Woman". Wald and Reddy were furious in the control room and Senter was clearly not happy and voices were raised, however he did not quit the project. Helen put her voice on the track that Senter produced and she and Jeff left the studio since they only were interested in having this record quickly finished and released as a single by Capitol Records in conjunction with the film Stand and Be Counted. That release triggered a five-figured payment to Helen which at the time was sorely needed according to Wald.
Immediately after that guitarist Deasy played the riff on his 12 string electric guitar which became the signature sound for the song. Senter then asked friend and noted sax man, Jim Horn to write string and horn charts to be recorded the following week, while Senter went into the studio with Clydie King, Vanetta Fields and Shirley Matthews (the Blossoms) and layered the background vocals which when coupled with the horn's created a broad sound that left the original Reddy vocal seem thin and frail.
Mauri Lathower, the head of A&R, who brought Senter in to produce deflected Jeff Wald's pressure tactics and threats so Senter was able to complete what he believed to be a record having great social significance.
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." "I am Woman" became the second Helen Reddy hit - after "I Don't Know How to Love Him" - to peak at #2 in her native Australia. Overlooked in its original UK release, "I am Woman" was given a 1975 reissue to serve as followup to Reddy's #5 UK hit "Angie Baby" but did not gain enough momentum to reach the UK Top 50.
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 Organization for 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."[3]
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 he 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, jewelry 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."[4][5]
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.")[2]
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."[2]
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".
"I am Woman" 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."[2]In 2006 Burger King featured a lyrically adjusted version of "I am Woman" for a commercial titled "Manthem" extolling the virtues of large burgers over small "chick food" plates.[6]
The song is heard briefly in the Simpsons episode Brother from the Same Planet broadcast 4 February 1993. "I am Woman" was also featured in the 3 July 2008 broadcast of the CBS series Swingtown and the 2 September 2008 broadcast of The Secret Life of the American Teenager featured a rendition of the song by the school band.
The song is also used in a scene from the film My Best Friend's Wedding. The main characters, played by Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Dermot Mulroney enter a kareoke bar and the song is heard playing loud, to which you hear a male's voice singing the lyrics. The audience then sees a young, drunk man singing with the microphone.
The style of the title has become iconic and has inspired other songs, such as 'I Am Cow' by The Arrogant Worms and poems including 'I Am Pigeon' by Flying Lemming.
On 11 September 2010 Matthew Wilkening of AOL Radio "I am Woman" at #7 on the list of the 100 Worst Songs Ever.[7]
"I am Woman" was a minor C&W hit for Bobbie Roy who like Reddy was on the Capitol Records roster; Roy's version of "I am Woman" reached #51 on the C&W chart in February 1973. Also in 1973 "I am Woman" was covered by R&B singer Betty Wright on her Hard to Stop album and also by Easy Listening veteran Eydie Gorme as a solo track on Feelin' an album which was overall a duets project with Gorme's husband Steve Lawrence who had starred in Stand Up & Be Counted.
In 1979 pianist Paul Weston and vocalist Jo Stafford recorded "I am Woman" in the guise of the untalented lounge act Jonathan & Darlene Edwards: this version was released as a single which also featured a cover of the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" with both songs delivered in classic "Jonathan & Darlene" mode with off notes, shifting tempo and style, and mismatched percussion.
The soundtrack for Sex and the City 2 features a performance of "I am Woman" as sung in film by its stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon. in Sex and the City 2.
"I am Woman" was also remade by Jessica Williams as a dance track featured in the 1999 film, Trick and was covered by The Dan Band on their CD The Dan Band Live inspiring a one-hour music special by the group, Dan Finnerty & The Dan Band: I Am Woman.
"I am Woman" has been recorded by Sisters Roar to raise money for 3 charities; Breast Cancer, Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust & Star Support for Domestic Abuse. Organised by Sally Bee, the founder of the Precious Hearts Foundation, around 40 women recorded the song on the 16th July at Angel Studios in Islington. This version is being released on the 1st August 2011 and 100% of the money raised will go to the three chosen charities.
| 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 |