The market in 1965 for many styles of music was exploding. Chicago blues was encountering a seismic shift from primarily an urban African American fan base to a mostly white market, especially on college campuses. At age 14, Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” was aimed at a singles market that was ready for subjects more mature than songs of the day aimed at adolescent girls like herself who made up a majority of the singles charts. The following year, it reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Janis Ian addressed interracial dating at a time when blues was finding a growing fan base among people who were outgrowing the singles chart. At the time, I was at Tufts University, listening to blues on FM station WBCN and a Harvard radio station, but I only had AM radio in my car—WBZ and WMEX, two stations playing “Society’s Child” as it climbed the charts. Her arrangement had nothing in common with the blues, but the subject matter concerning interracial dating was very timely.
In a 2015 talk at Berklee College of Music, Janis explained that artists sell soap and that their only hope is to make their soap better than others. “In order to earn a living,” she adds today. “That needs to be put in context.”
She’s also been quoted as saying that to be born an artist is to be an outlaw. I asked her what she’s done in her career to be an outlaw. “I’ve outlived my enemies,” she shot back, then added, “Good question!”
The more I talked to her, the more she seemed to have in common with blues artists. Now 74, Janis Ian is touring the country, bookending her early work and playing venues like Caffè Lena in Saratoga, NY. The tour is billed as “American Masters – Janis Ian: Breaking Silence,” which includes a 2024 PBS documentary featuring archival footage, new interviews, and Janis’s own reflections.
“I’m doing something I haven’t been doing in a long time,” says Janis. “I’m staying after the show basically to say goodbye to people and say thank you.” At age 74, she’s meeting fans who say, “I never got a chance to see you at 14, and I would like to.”
In retrospect, she says, “At 14 I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my feelings as an artist, and what it meant to be an artist.” And yet she was able to create a song that was one of the most popular songs of the day. “Well, you know, I think that’s the challenge. I think you’re born with talent, and your job is to nurture it and to make sense. But you’re born with the talent. I didn’t otherwise plan to start writing poetry at 10. I was watching Willie Nelson the other day in an interview. He was quoting the first poem he ever wrote when he was 10 years old, and it was really a good poem. You know, how do you explain that?”
Sounds like something I hear from blues artists every day.
“Society’s Child” may be her best seller, but she feels her most recent work is her best. “I know it’s a cliché, but it’s the only album I ever made where I felt it was faultless.” She agrees with me that artists continue to get better with age. “I think the problem with age is energy. The creative act takes so much energy. When I was taking masters classes I would say it increases the energy and attention that is only duplicated by a woman trying to give birth. That’s the only thing I can really relate it to.
“You start running out of that kind of energy. I used to be able to sit and write for six or seven hours, and now I probably get through two. I just don’t have that kind of energy. I would be working on one song. I’m also trying to develop this mental card, and I’m also working on the melody as well as the lyrics. There’s a lot more to it than just, hey, I know how to write a song.”
So, what was the genesis that led to her writing a song about the challenges of an interracial relationship that would become her legacy forever after? “It was just seeing what was going on around me. We were living in East Orange, New Jersey, a predominant black area, and I noticed the black parents didn’t want their kids dating white kids, and the white parents didn’t want their kids dating black kids, and it was interesting to understand that part of it was them not wanting their children to have trouble, but it seemed ridiculous, you know?”
Now, tell me she doesn’t fit into the blues sorority.
