A Survivor's Self-Portrait

Janis Ian, who entered the world as Janis Fink in 1951, opens Society's Child: My Autobiography with a sweeping essay on the cultural upheavals of the 1950s and '60s. "I was born into the crack that split America," she writes. It's an oddly abstract, even grandiose, way for someone to begin an account of her own life, but Ian immediately follows this commentary with a story that shows the very personal consequences of a society in flux: She is 15 years old, performing to a large concert crowd in California. As she begins "Society's Child," her song about an interracial teen romance, adults in the audience start chanting "Nigger lover," hissing and booing until she flees the stage in tears. It's hard to imagine now, but the tensions of the day were such that grown-ups would actually pay hard-earned money for the opportunity to scream abuse at a kid. She got threatening letters as well, and people spit in her plate at restaurants.

Ian went on to write better songs and have bigger hits—including the agony anthem "At Seventeen"—but controversy sparked by "Society's Child" introduced her to the rough side of being an artist. The record's producer had encouraged her to change the lyrics to remove the racial element. She chose instead to heed a friend's warning: "You whore now, you'll whore forever." She committed herself to the French poet Rimbaud's concept of the all-encompassing creative life. As she puts it, "Before you were a wife, before you were a mother, before you were even a human being, you were an artist." If there's a primary theme in her book, it's her faith in the supreme importance of art and in her own artistic integrity.

As courageous as she was, the truth is that young Janis would have been an unlikely candidate for America's Sweetheart no matter what sort of songs she wrote. Her first hurdle was her looks, which were completely different from the WASP-y, leggy, straight-haired sylph that was every white girl's ideal. Even worse, she was a "red diaper baby," the child of leftist parents who ran socialist summer camps and worked in the civil rights movement. FBI harassment cost her schoolteacher father a series of jobs, and she enjoyed turning the tables by blowing a police whistle into the family's tapped phone. To complete the trifecta of offenses to Middle American prejudices, her family was, in Ian's words, "fervently Jewish." They were also atheists, though Ian abandoned unbelief at an early age.

What she had going for her, in addition to her talent, was a remarkable musical education. Her father began teaching her to play the piano when she was a toddler, and she grew up listening to everyone from Ma Rainey to Hank Williams. The summer camps were entertained by the likes of Pete Seeger and Richie Havens. Her family's involvement in activist/folkie circles led to attention for her early songwriting efforts, and she got to meet and perform with major artists such as Tom Paxton and Odetta. Among its other virtues, Ian's book is a rare reminder of the cultural and political debt America owes the leftists it tried so hard to destroy during the Cold War.

"Society's Child," became Ian's first hit in spite of the uproar against it, and, predictably, many in the folk music world turned away from her. "The envy was incredible," she writes. In fact, almost everything about her life turned upside down at that point, and the next three decades were filled with a battering series of highs and lows that included Grammy-winning records, international stardom, mental and physical illness, a violent marriage and a nasty divorce—also penury, thanks to the combined heartlessness of a crooked accountant and the IRS.

Since the late 1980s, the backdrop to Ian's ups and downs has been Nashville. She first arrived in 1986 hoping to discipline her songwriting in a place that was, as she writes, "steeped in craft." She found it a remarkably congenial place for an East Coast, Jewish, lesbian pop musician, and she developed friendships with country icons like Chet Atkins and Don Schlitz. Her early Nashville years were marred by, among other things, a serious bout with chronic fatigue syndrome, but readers who love a happy ending won't be disappointed. The book goes out on a joyful note, with her 2003 wedding in Canada to the partner she met here.

Society's Child is an engaging tale, rich with vivid portraits of people and places, but it would have benefited from a little more attention to the calendar. It's often necessary to page back to try to determine what year Ian is talking about, and sometimes it's just not possible to figure out. A dated discography would be helpful here since Ian seems to structure her memories around recording projects.

Her writing has a graceful, spare style, and the book is free of whining or bitterness. Its rare bubbly moments seem completely genuine. When she drops names—"I couldn't believe it, that Ella Fitzgerald was waiting for my next record. It gave me hope"—she comes across as endearingly starstruck, not self-important.