She was another loner and outcast, and also a woman apparently driven to her maddeningly repetitive chorus by a “farm boy from Tennessee” who “taught it all to Ruby, then just let her be.” Delta Dawn all over again.
The chorus: “Leave me alone, won’t you leave me alone / Please leave me alone, now leave me alone" the sentiment being repeated for a full eight lines, for all three choruses. Like DD, Ruby also wanders around town (unnamed), “talkin’ to herself” and fleeing at the approach of others. “Ruby Red Dress” was a very similar figure (clearly Reddy’s producers knew a good niche when they saw it). A sort of AM-radio Blanche DuBois, poor Dawn was, viewed from a 21st century perspective, a victim of the cruel sexual mores that still treated a “fallen” woman as a pariah, if not in fact a madwoman, at least in places like Brownsville. “All the folks around Brownsville say she’s crazy,” we learn, as she “walks downtown with a suitcase in her hand, looking for a mysterious dark-haired man” - the man “of low degree” who apparently seduced and abandoned her. This would be young gay men, or maybe proto-gay men: prepubescent, prehormonal, but still innately and acutely aware that they were somehow destined, if they didn’t find their own way to “roar” their truth, or at least whisper it to sympathetic ears, to being relegated to the margins of society.Ĭonsider Delta Dawn, the doomed and apparently deranged heroine of the title. Women of the era naturally propelled the song to popularity, coming as it did when the Equal Rights Amendment was being debated, and women would begin fighting the backlash against feminism that would bring the likes of Phyllis Schlafly and Marabel Morgan (she of the “wrap yourself in cellophane to keep the man interested” book “The Total Woman”) into the cultural conversation.īut I am sure there was another audience that cherished Reddy and her string of pop hits at the time. True, hearing it now, it seems almost quaint in its bald polemicism - if you can describe as polemicism the rather mild notion that a woman, or rather all women, are as strong, powerful and ready to “roar” as men. Helen Reddy, the Australian-born pop singer who died on Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 78, has justly been celebrated and mourned for her groundbreaking, then nigh-radical hit “I Am Woman," which reached the top of the charts late in 1972.
Singer Helen Reddy, who died on Tuesday at 78.