Janis Ian is in career-retrospective mode lately, but she’s handling it – as usual – in thoroughly modern fashion. The confessional singer/songwriter, creator of the boomer-icon hits “Society’s Child” and “At Seventeen,” has long since abandoned the major-label merry-go-ground – she’s been releasing new music on her own Rude Girl imprint for more than a decade. Nevertheless, she is getting the “Essential” treatment from Sony/Legacy with a two-disc anthology that arrived in stores and online last week. But there’s a twist: The Essential Janis Ian is essentially a reprint of a compilation titled Best of Janis Ian: The Autobiography Collection, which she self-released last year in conjunction with her critically acclaimed memoir, Society’s Child: My Autobiography.
The book begins with a clear-eyed portrait of her troubled upbringing as the child of leftists under constant FBI surveillance, and her early blossoming as a songwriter – her first song, a haunting Childe-ballad update titled “Hair of Spun Gold,” was published in the folk-music periodical Broadside when she was 12. She recorded the controversial, interracial-romance drama “Society’s Child” when she was 15; the single had to be re-released twice before it became a Top 20 hit in 1967, despite being banned by radio stations across the South, and Ian recounts a live performance that engendered so much racial hatred that she briefly feared for her life. Here she is performing the song on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. (more…)
