In Case You Missed It - Janis Ian Feature in People; New Documentary Film Out Now
Published
In Case You Missed It
Janis Ian Featured in People Magazine
New Award Wining, Documentary Film
Varda Bar-Kar’s Janis Ian: Breaking Silence
In Theaters Now
In the mid-60s, Janis Ian, a teenage singer-songwriter from New Jersey, scores a controversial hit single called “Society’s Child,” about an interracial love relationship. The song launches her illustrious career but also ignites death threats, plunging her into an emotional tailspin – only to emerge from the ashes in the 1970s with an even bigger hit,”At Seventeen,” ahead of its time in confronting lookism and bullying. Janis overcomes significant obstacles – embezzlement, record industry misogyny, homophobia, and heartbreak – to find love and produce an indelible body of searingly honest songs that earned her a devoted following and critical acclaim.
Janis Ian: Breaking Silence features Janis Ian, friends, and collaborators,
including Joan Baez, Lily Tomlin, Jean Smart, Laurie Metcalf, and Arlo Guthrie.
Select Screenings
With In-Person Q&A
With Janis Ian and Varda Bar-Kar include:
April 9 – Roxie Theater San Francisco CA 6:00 PM
April 10 – Smith Rafael Film Center San Rafael CA 7:00 PM
April 11 – Opera Plaza Cinema San Francisco CA 7:00 PM
April 12 – Opera Plaza Cinema San Francisco CA 1:00 PM
April 12 – Rialto Elmwood Berkeley CA Time tba
April 12 – Rialto Elmwood Berkeley CA Time tba
May 5 – Belcourt Theater Nashville TN 8:00 PM (with only Varda Bar-Kar for Q&A, Janis will not be attending)
More information on all screenings available here
Singer Janis Ian Walked Off Stage
and Sobbed over Crowd’s Racist Response
to Her Controversial Interracial-Romance Hit
The “Society’s Child” singer-songwriter discusses the life-changing experience in the new documentary ‘Janis Ian: Breaking Silence’
By Jeremy Helligar Published on March 29, 2025
- Singer-songwriter Janis Ian had a Top 20 hit at age 16 with her 1966 debut single “Society’s Child”
- The song, written from the point of view of a young girl involved in an interracial romance, sparked controversy over its lyrical content
- Ian enjoyed an even bigger hit in 1975 with the coming-of-age anthem “At Seventeen,” which won a Grammy
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian is best known for her 1975 Top 10 single “At Seventeen,” but at 16, she became a different kind of teen pop star. The year was 1967, and Ian soared into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100 with a song she wrote at 13 called “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking).”
The track, which was her first single, tackled the then fairly taboo subject of interracial romance from the point of view of a White girl dealing with the world’s racist reaction to to her relationship with a Black guy. While the song was a hit, the subject matter put Ian at the center of controversy. Some club owners refused to book her out of fear of violence, and in the new documentary Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, she recalls one show at Valley Music Theater in Encino, Calif. — “probably my fourth or fifth time on a concert stage” — where she got a lot more than she thought she could handle.
Four or five songs into her set, mayhem broke out.
“When I started ‘Society’s Child,’ these people started yelling,” Ian, who will turn 74 on April 7, recalls. “And I thought they were yelling something nice ‘cause on stage you can’t really hear what people are yelling very clearly. But I realized they were all yelling ‘N—- lover!’ at me. I didn’t know if it was 10 or 20 people or if it was the majority of the audience. It became this horrible, almost prayer-like chant.”
She tried to block out the noise and focus on singing, but the chanting grew louder and louder. “I knew that I was going to start to cry, and I didn’t want them to see me cry.” she says. “So I put down my guitar on the stage, and I walked off stage, and I went to the restroom, and I started to cry. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”
After a while, the promoter, who had been in the box-office and missed the commotion in the crowd, came into the bathroom and asked her why she wasn’t on stage. After she explained what had happened, he delivered some tough words.
“He said, ‘Well, you don’t leave the stage because somebody calls you a name,” Ian remembers. “People were getting shot. People were getting knifed. People were disappearing. Freedom riders were getting killed. It was civil war. And I didn’t want to die. I really didn’t want to die. We argued for quite a while. It felt like years. And he finally said something like, ‘I can’t believe the girl who wrote that song is a coward.’ “
Ian, the granddaughter of Jewish Russian immigrants, thought of everything her family had endured before coming to the United States. (Ian was born Janis Eddy Fink in Farmingdale, N.J.) “Who was I to leave the stage”? she decided. “So I went back on stage, and I picked up my guitar, and I started to sing again, and I thought, ‘Okay, here I am.’ And I made it my business to keep singing the song, get through the show.”
The chanting continued, and the ushers came in and shined their flashlights on the people who were making the noise so the audience could see who they were. The theater manager then threw them out. Ian later realized that the 20-odd people who had created the ruckus had come to the concert for the express purpose of intimidating her. In the end, she was more affected by the people in the crowd and on staff who stood up to the hecklers.
“It was a life changing moment for me,” Ian says. “Because I realized for the first time that the song didn’t just have the power to make people angry, but it had the power to make people stand up and stand up for what they believe. And that was a huge deal, that music could do that. I think that was a large part of what set me on my course.”
Eight years after “Society’s Child,” Ian scored again with another anthem: “At Seventeen.” Though she was in her early twenties when it became a hit in 1975, she perfectly captured the complicated feeling of being on the cusp of adulthood and not quite fitting in. The song went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, won Ian a Grammy and became one of the defining hits of the ’70s.
In the documentary, Celine Dion, Laurie Metcalf and Jean Smart all pay homage to “At Seventeen,” which Ian performed on the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975.
“I played the hell out of that record,” Metcalf says in the documentary. “It was so specific and so relevant for generations of women. To this day, it affects me the same way as when I first heard it.”
Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is now playing in select theaters.
About Janis IanJanis Ian is a 10-time GRAMMY nominee (two-time winner) whose songs and performances have resonated with a diverse group of fans for more than five decades. She is one of just a handful of artists who have received nominations in eight completely different categories. Raised by activist Jewish parents on a New Jersey farm, she currently lives in Florida with her partner and wife of 34 years.
Ian received her first GRAMMY nomination in 1967 for “Best Folk Album” with Janis Ian, featuring “Society’s Child.” She took home her first GRAMMY in 1975 for “Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female – At Seventeen,” and her second for “Best Spoken Word Album – Society’s Child: My Autobiography” in 2013. Her 2023 GRAMMY nomination for “Best Folk Album,” The Light at the End of the Line, brought her full circle.
Two of her most powerful songs, “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen,” were inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame in 2002 and 2008, respectively. She received the International Folk Music Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023 and was honored by Ireland’s Tradfest and Ireland’s Minister of Culture in 2024 for Outstanding Achievements In the Arts.
Ian has been mining her treasure trove of music and memorabilia for a massive archival project, the Janis Ian Archives, that opened in October of 2024 at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. She has also been preparing collections of rare and previously unreleased recordings. The first two releases, Live at the Calderone Theater 1975 and Worktapes & Demos Vol. 1, dropped last fall with more to come. She is also making appearances to support the theatrical release of a documentary about her life and work. Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is helmed by award-winning director/producer Varda Bar-Kar, best known for Big Voice (Netflix, PBS) and Fandango at the Wall (Max). Along with Ian, the film, which will have a June 2025 broadcast premiere on PBS’ famed American Masters, features interviews with friends including Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Lily Tomlin, Jean Smart, Laurie Metcalf, and others.
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