Collaboration With Ray Burton
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'. | ” |
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 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.
Read more about this topic: I Am Woman
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