In 2001, "Society's Child" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which honors recordings considered timeless and important to music history. The single and Ian's 1967 eponymous debut album were finally released on Verve Forecast her album was also a hit, reaching #12. Years later, Ian says, Atlantic's president at the time, Jerry Wexler, publicly apologized to her for this. Ian relates on her website that, although the song was originally intended for Atlantic and the label paid for her recording session, the label subsequently returned the master to her and quietly refused to release it.
In the summer of 1967, "Society's Child" reached #14 on the Billboard Hot 100, the single having sold 600,000 copies, and the album 350,000.
The song's lyrical content was taboo for some radio stations, and they withdrew or banned it from their playlists accordingly in her 2008 autobiography Society's Child, Ian recalls receiving hate mail and death threats as a response to the song, and mentions that a radio station in Atlanta that played it was burned down.
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Produced by George "Shadow" Morton and released three times between 19, "Society's Child" finally became a national hit upon its third release, after Leonard Bernstein featured it in a TV special titled Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution. Music careerĪt the age of thirteen, Ian wrote and sang her first hit single, "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)", about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl's mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers: the girl ultimately decides to end the relationship, claiming the societal norms of the day have left her no other choice. In 1964, she legally changed her name to Janis Ian, using as her new last name her brother Eric's middle name. At the age of 12, Ian wrote her first song, "Hair of Spun Gold," which was subsequently published in the folk publication Broadside and was later recorded for her debut album. Starting with piano lessons at the age of 6 or 7, by the time she hit her teens, Ian had learned the organ, harpsichord, French horn, flute and guitar. Young Janis admired the work of folk pioneers such as Joan Baez and Odetta. Ian would allude to these years later in her song "God and the FBI". In that Cold War era they were frequently under government surveillance because of their left-wing politics. Her parents, Victor (a music teacher) and Pearl, ran a summer camp in upstate New York. In 1975, Ian won a Grammy Award for her song, "At Seventeen".īorn to a Jewish family in New York City, she was primarily raised in New Jersey, initially on a farm, and attended East Orange High School and the New York City High School of Music & Art. Ian first entered the folk music scene while still a teenager in the mid-sixties most active musically in that decade and the 1970s, she has continued recording into the 21st century. Janis Ian (born Janis Eddy Fink, April 7, 1951) is an American songwriter, singer, musician, columnist, and science fiction author.
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