Helen Reddy

Helen Reddy was born in Melbourne in 1941 into a show business family and was working vaudeville stages by the age of four, so by the time the '70s came calling she had already paid a lifetime of dues. A 1966 talent-contest win on the TV show Bandstand bought her a ticket to New York and a record audition that went nowhere. She kept moving, to Chicago and then Los Angeles, cutting "One Way Ticket" in 1968 and "I Believe in Music" in 1970, whose flip side, "I Don't Know How to Love Him", made number eight in Canada's RPM. Capitol signed her a year later.

"I Am Woman", from the album I Don't Know How to Love Him, was the one that mattered: a pop song that marched instead of swooned, and it became an anthem for second-wave feminism. Through the decade she was a hit machine in America, with 15 top-40 singles on the Hot 100, three of them number ones, and six adult-contemporary chart-toppers in a row. She took Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist at the first American Music Awards in 1974 and hosted her own weekly primetime variety hour, the first Australian to do that on an American network.

She quit live performing in 2002, went back to university and worked as a clinical hypnotherapist, then returned to the stage in 2011 after a birthday duet with her half-sister Toni Lamond. She died in 2020, with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to her name.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.