Helen Reddy 'I Am Woman'

'I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman'

Helen Reddy's live performance of the hit single 'I Am Woman', a song taken from the 1972 album 'I Am Woman'.
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http://www.helenreddy.com/

Helen Reddy (born October 25, 1941 in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian pop singer and actor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Reddy was immensely successful as a singer in the 1970s with numerous hit records including three U.S. #1 singles. She has sold more than 15 million albums and 10 million singles, and was the first Australian-born performer to win a Grammy award.

Reddy's first Top 40 U.S. hit (1971) was a cover of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" (from Jesus Christ Superstar).

She scored an international hit in 1972 with a re-recorded version of a song she co-wrote with Australian musician Ray Burton, the feminist anthem "I Am Woman", which became her first U.S #1.

Reddy has attributed the impetus for writing "I Am Woman" and her early awareness of the women's movement to expatriate Australian rock critic and pioneer feminist Lillian Roxon.

Reddy is quoted in Fred Bronson's The Billboard Book of Number One Hits as saying that she was looking for songs to record which reflected the positive self-image she had gained from joining the women's movement but couldn't find any, so

"I realized that the song I was looking for didn't exist, and I was going to have to write it myself."

The single actually barely dented the chart on its initial release in the summer of 1972, but it wasn't long before female listeners adopted the song as an anthem and began requesting it from their local radio stations in droves, spurring it to re-enter the charts in September and become a hit.

"I Am Woman" earned a Grammy Award for Female Pop Vocal Performance and at the awards ceremony she concluded her acceptance speech by famously thanking God

"because She makes everything possible".

Helen Reddy being interviewed in the mid '70s - during her international peak. {74}
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Helen Reddy and other Australian female singers speak about the Helen Reddy hit 'I Am Woman' on the ABC TV documentary series 'Love Is In The Air'.

'I Am Woman' is an anthem for women's liberation and still remains over looked as one of Australia's greatest songs.

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Helen Reddy on the Today Show May 2006
Ann Curry's interview with Helen Reddy, May 4, 2006 on the release of the book "The Woman I Am."
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Marcia Hines' Countdown performance of the hit single 'You' (later covered by Rita Coolidge).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogfe4nGYNxM

Renee Geyer's promo-video for the hit single 'Say I Love You' (Eddie Grant cover) which reached number 5 in the Australian chart and was taken from the 1981 album 'So Lucky'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJBeRPkUQOc

{Molly introduces Renee at the end of this clip}
INXS perform their cover of the Loved Ones' classic 'The Loved One'. There is also a short interview with Michael Hutchence talking to host Ian 'Molly' Meldrum about the current 'Loved One' single.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQTgcRQWhI0

... (more)+++++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Woman

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 celebrating the organisation's 10th anniversary closed with the playing of "I Am Woman".

"Suddenly 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."