The 1970s File Feature
I Don't Know How To Love Him
Helen Reddy's "I Don't Know How to Love Him": A 20-Week Journey to Number 13 "I Don't Know How to Love Him" was not originally a pop song. It was written by …
01 The Story
Helen Reddy's "I Don't Know How to Love Him": A 20-Week Journey to Number 13
"I Don't Know How to Love Him" was not originally a pop song. It was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice as a centerpiece ballad for their rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which debuted as a concept album in 1970 before it reached the stage. The song was written for the character of Mary Magdalene, and its positioning as a devotional love song delivered by a woman toward a figure of transcendent significance gave it a dual meaning that secular listeners could engage with on purely emotional terms. Helen Reddy's recording took that dual accessibility and turned it into one of the most enduring pop recordings of 1971.
Helen Reddy was an Australian-born singer who had been making her way through the American music industry since the late 1960s, working with varying commercial success before landing at Capitol Records. By early 1971, she had yet to have a major American hit, and "I Don't Know How to Love Him" became the breakthrough that established her commercial viability in the United States. The timing was advantageous: the Jesus Christ Superstar album had generated significant public interest in the material, and Reddy's recording gave radio a standalone pop vehicle that did not require familiarity with the larger work.
The recording was produced by Jeff Wald, Reddy's manager and husband, a decision that reflected the DIY entrepreneurialism of her early American career. The production was elegant and restrained, built around a string arrangement that framed Reddy's powerful alto voice without overwhelming it. Her vocal performance was among the finest of her career: controlled, emotionally precise, and capable of the kind of gradual dynamic escalation that the song's structure required. The arrangement moved from quiet, almost hesitant delivery in the opening verses to a full-voiced climax that gave the ballad genuine dramatic shape.
"I Don't Know How to Love Him" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on February 20, 1971, entering at number 99, the very bottom of the chart. Its climb was exceptional: over the following four months, the single rose continuously, sustained by airplay momentum that built as the track became familiar to wider audiences. The song reached its peak position of number 13 during the week of June 5, 1971, and its chart run of 20 weeks on the Hot 100 was one of the longest stays for any single that year. A 20-week chart run in 1971 represented genuine, sustained listener engagement rather than a flash of promotional activity.
The single also reached number 13 on the Adult Contemporary chart, where its elegant production and emotionally accessible lyrical content were particularly well suited to the format's programming criteria. The adult contemporary audience, which skewed older and more female than the broader pop market, responded strongly to the ballad's combination of vulnerability and vocal strength, qualities that would define Reddy's commercial identity going forward.
The success of "I Don't Know How to Love Him" opened the door for Reddy's landmark recording of "I Am Woman" in 1972, which became a number 1 hit and an anthem of the women's liberation movement. In retrospect, these two recordings define the poles of her early American career: the vulnerable, questioning ballad on one side and the defiant, empowering anthem on the other. Together they established Reddy as one of the most commercially significant female artists of the early 1970s, a performer capable of embodying the era's contradictions around femininity, strength, and self-definition.
The Jesus Christ Superstar stage musical opened on Broadway in October 1971, and its enormous success further extended the life of the song in the cultural imagination. Multiple artists recorded versions in the wake of the stage production's success, but Reddy's recording remained the definitive pop version for a generation of listeners who encountered the song through radio rather than the theater. Her version was the one that demonstrated the song could exist successfully outside its original dramatic context and speak directly to listeners as a secular declaration of overwhelming feeling.
02 Song Meaning
Bewilderment, Devotion, and the Limits of Understanding in "I Don't Know How to Love Him"
"I Don't Know How to Love Him" is a song about the experience of being overwhelmed by feeling for another person, and its central conceit is the gap between emotional intensity and emotional comprehension. The narrator knows she loves, knows the feeling is real and powerful, but cannot map it onto her prior experience or integrate it into her understanding of herself. The phrase "I don't know how" carries a specific meaning: not that she lacks the will to love but that she lacks the framework. The love exists; the vocabulary for it does not yet.
In its original theatrical context, the song was written for Mary Magdalene as a response to Jesus Christ, and the layers of meaning this adds are substantial. A woman who has lived outside conventional religious and social frameworks is confronted with a kind of love that is neither romantic nor maternal nor devotional in any form she has known. The bewilderment is authentic: how does one categorize an attachment that crosses every available category?
In Helen Reddy's pop recording, stripped of that explicit context, the song functions as a secular meditation on the experience of meeting someone who renders all your previous emotional experience inadequate. The narrator has loved before, she makes this clear, she has given herself to relationships and understood what that meant. But this is different. The difference is precisely what she cannot account for, and the song's repeated admission of ignorance becomes a form of testimony: she does not know how to love him, which means she has never felt quite this before.
Reddy's vocal performance adds a dimension of earned authority to the bewilderment. Her voice is powerful, trained, capable of great range and expressiveness. The restraint she brings to the early verses makes the controlled vulnerability sound genuine rather than performed, a strong person genuinely disoriented by feeling rather than a conventionally helpless figure appealing for sympathy. The dynamic arc of the performance, from quiet uncertainty to full-voiced declaration, mirrors the emotional journey of someone moving from confusion toward the acceptance that the confusion itself is the answer.
The song also operates within a tradition of devotional music that crosses the boundary between sacred and secular, a tradition in which the language of romantic love and the language of religious love have always been interchangeable. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice exploited this interchangeability deliberately, knowing that a song about loving a divine figure in human terms would also resonate as a song about loving any person who has transformed the lover's understanding of themselves. The genius of the lyric is that it works in both directions simultaneously, and Reddy's recording demonstrates that the secular reading is fully sufficient to carry the song's emotional weight.
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