The teenager who wrote about the song nobody wanted to play

Janis Ian was born Janis Eddy Fink in 1951 and raised on a farm in Farmingdale, New Jersey. Her parents, a music teacher and a college fundraiser, were liberal atheists of Jewish background who ran summer camps in upstate New York. Music came early: she began piano lessons at two, at her own insistence, and by her teens she was also playing organ, harmonica, French horn and guitar, while admiring folk singers such as Joan Baez and Odetta.

At twelve she wrote her first song, “Hair of Spun Gold”, which was published in the folk magazine Broadside and later recorded for her debut album. In 1964 she legally changed her name, taking her brother Eric’s middle name as her new surname. By then she was already moving through the American folk scene, still a teenager.

At fourteen she wrote and recorded “Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking)”, a song about an interracial romance that a girl’s mother forbade and her peers and teachers frowned on. George “Shadow” Morton produced it, and the record was put out three times between 1965 and 1967. It only became a national hit on that third release, after Leonard Bernstein featured it in a CBS television special about rock. In July 1967 it reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold 600,000 copies.

The second act arrived in 1975 with Between the Lines, her seventh studio album, which reached number one on the Billboard 200 that September. Its single “At Seventeen” made the Top Ten and won her a Grammy that year. She kept recording into the twenty-first century and won a second Grammy in 2013, for the spoken-word recording of her autobiography, titled Society’s Child. Along the way she became a columnist and a science fiction author, a reminder that the girl at the piano had plenty more to say.