We spent a little time last weekend watching the new bio-pic about Helen Reddy. Telling the tale of her hardscrabble journey from a single mom scraping by in New York City thousands of miles from her family to a pop superstar of the seventies, it featured every one of her greatest hits in a context of both time and narrative. The film ended with Reddy coming out of retirement to perform I Am Woman at the Women's March on January 22, 2017.
It was a pretty good Saturday night movie, and although I sang along with every. single. song. You and Me Against the World was still stuck in my head yesterday when the news broke that Helen Reddy had died.
After watching the movie, I read that she was in a memory care unit, but there was something a little comforting about knowing that Helen Reddy, that radio icon of my childhood, was still out there somewhere. Her passing made me sad to lose another link to those days.
Coincidentally, in one scene of the movie, she was recording I Believe in Music, which was originally to be the A side of what would become her first top 40 hit, I Don't Know How to Love Him.
"Who sang that song?" I asked Heidi, but she shrugged.
"You know, it goes Music is love and love is music if you know what I mean," I sang. "People who believe in music are the happiest people I've ever seen! I think it was Mac Davis." A quick search of the world wide web confirmed my rusty memory. "I bet I could play that song on my ukulele!" I continued, and another search brought up the tabs for the song.
And so it happened that I was also singing I Believe in Music when I found out that Mac Davis had died, too. I know the 1970 was 50 years ago, but it doesn't really feel that far away, except for all the people who are gone.
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