BEREA, Ky. — A tribute concert featuring the works of multiple GRAMMY Award-winning artist Janis Ian will highlight a four-day celebration marking the opening of the singer-songwriter’s personal archives at Berea College. More than a dozen activities are scheduled on the Berea College campus Oct. 17-20, 2024.

Performers at the Oct. 20 tribute concert will include Amythyst Kiah, S.G. Goodman, Melissa Carper, Aoife Scott and Senora May. Each will perform a selection from Ian’s vast catalogue of music.

Ian will be on campus for the celebration, titled “Breaking Silence” after her 1993 album, which included a song with the same name.

“Listen to the whispers sing / Listen to the singer shout / We were speaking / of values and violence / breaking silence.”

“Most schools create million-dollar stadiums. Berea creates million-dollar students,” Ian said. “My family and fans have supported Berea since 2004, first raising more than $600,000 in scholarship funding and now turning my life over to their brilliant archivists.

“I suggested titling the event ‘Breaking Silence’ because that’s one of the important things Berea brings to the world—activism, whether it be personal, social or political,” Ian added

In 2022, Ian announced she was donating everything—from her father’s 1947 Martin D-19 guitar to song notebooks, journals, contracts, financial records and the history of her family’s emigration to America—to Berea College with the promise that the collection remain open to the public.

“Berea is all about service—to the community and to the world at large,” Ian said. “My elders taught me that in return for the opportunities I’d been given, part of my job was to give back. From the time I began writing songs in 1963 to my current projects, my life involves service.”

The four-day celebration will include a once-in-a-lifetime series of activities including special presentations, guided tours, classes and more. Footage from Ian’s public addresses and concerts will be shown throughout the weekend. VIP-experience guests will have the opportunity to attend a private screening of a new, yet-to-be-released documentary about Ian’s life and work.

Opening exhibits will include the guitar she used to write one of her most famous songs, “Society’s Child,” a Janis Ian signature model guitar being created especially for the occasion by Santa Crus Guitars founder Luthier Richard Hoover, signed scripts from audiobook and television appearances (with the likes of Jean Smart and Laurie Metcalf), awards and other notable pieces of memorabilia. A listening station will allow visitors to hear Ian’s recordings on vinyl. A timeline of Ian’s life will allow visitors to see the artist’s expansive career, her family’s history and her life in service.

Special guests at the celebration will include award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield, world-renowned photographer Peter Cunningham and award-winning director Varda Bar-Kar, New York Times bestselling author of seven novels and Berea College professor Silas House will host the tribute concert, which will feature several artists including Kentucky singer-songwriter and Berea alumna Senora May.

To honor the memory of Ian’s parents, the Berea College Theatre department will present one of Ian’s mother’s early plays, and the Berea College Music department will also feature selections of Ian’s father’s music pieces.

The Janis Ian Archives are a unique resource for music history research, offering public access to 61 years of an artist’s career, including publishing, recording and live performance contracts, copyright paperwork, tax returns and contracts dating back to 1964. The extensive archival collection also includes Ian’s grandparents’ immigration papers, circa 1916.

Visitors to the collection can learn more about Ian, her work and her relationships with colleagues such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson.

Attendees will also get to experience the wide expanse of people who have covered her songs, including Cher, Celine Dion, John Mellencamp and Mel Torme.

Additional materials will document her years as a journalist for the iconic gay magazine, The Advocate, and the equally iconic magazine, Performing Songwriter, along with involvement in the civil rights, women’s and gay rights movements.

An early adopter of the internet and digital music—her website first went online in September 1999—her articles “The Internet Debacle” and its follow-up, “Fallout,” have been quoted both in USA Today and the Napster and Grokster Supreme Court cases and are still used in textbooks across the world.

“As a historian and archivist, it is truly amazing to make available this priceless collection,” said Tim Binkley, head of Berea College’s Special Collections and Archives. “Traditionally, a collection of this magnitude would only be found in a big city. To have a collection like this at Berea College is quite an honor. We look forward to visits from Janis’ fans during the celebration and beyond.”

Born on a chicken farm in southern New Jersey in 1951, Ian released her final solo studio album in 2022—an album that garnered Ian her 10th GRAMMY nomination—coincidentally in the exact same category as her first GRAMMY nomination in 1966.

One of Ian’s most famous songs, “At Seventeen” from the album Between the Lines won two GRAMMYs in 1976—one for best pop vocal performance by a female and one for best engineered non-classical. In 2022, Violet Grohl—daughter of Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl—sang the song at the “Hanukkah Sessions,” an event celebrating the holiday by sharing covers of songs by Jewish artists. The song has been described as ‘one of the all-time classic coming-of-age anthems.’

A schedule of events for the “Breaking Silence” celebration can be found at www.Berea.edu/janisian.  

Benefit concert tickets—as well as a few remaining VIP tickets—can be purchased on the website as well.