Janis Ian

Both sets of grandparents (from Poland, Ukraine, and Tashkent, Uzbekistan) lived in the New York-New Jersey area, having emigrated via England around 1918.

Her parents, Victor, a music teacher, and Pearl, a college fundraiser, were Jewish-born liberal atheists who ran several summer camps in upstate New York.

As a child, Ian admired the work of folk musicians such as Joan Baez and Odetta.

Starting with piano lessons at the age of two (at her own insistence), Ian, by the time she entered her teens, was playing the organ, harmonica, French horn and guitar.

At the age of 12, she wrote her first song, "Hair of Spun Gold", which was subsequently published in the folk publication Broadside and was later recorded for her eponymous debut album.

Janis Ian (born Janis Eddy Fink; April 7, 1951) is an American singer-songwriter who was most commercially successful in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in Farmingdale, New Jersey, Ian entered the American folk music scene while still a teenager in the mid-1960s.

In 1964, she legally changed her name to Janis Ian, taking her brother Eric's middle name as her new surname.

At the age of 14, Ian wrote and recorded her first hit single, "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)", about an interracial romance forbidden by a girl's mother and frowned upon by her peers and teachers.

Produced by George "Shadow" Morton and released three times from 1965 to 1967, "Society's Child" became a national hit upon its third release after Leonard Bernstein featured it in a late-April 1967 CBS TV special titled Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution.

The song's theme of interracial relationships was considered taboo by some radio stations, who withdrew or banned it from their playlists accordingly.

Her signature songs are the 1966/67 hit "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)" and the 1975 Top Ten single "At Seventeen", from her LP Between the Lines, which in September 1975 reached no. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

In July 1967, "Society's Child" reached no. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The single sold 600,000 copies and the album sold 350,000 copies.

At the age of 16, Ian met comedian Bill Cosby backstage at a Smothers Brothers show where she was promoting "Society's Child".

Since she was underage, she was accompanied by a chaperone while touring.

After her set, Ian had been sleeping with her head on the lap of her chaperone (an older female family friend).

The single and Ian's 1967 debut album (which reached no. 29 on the charts) were finally released on Verve Forecast.

Most active musically in that decade and the 1970s, she has continued recording into the 21st century.

She has won two Grammy Awards, the first in 1975 for "At Seventeen" and the second in 2013 for Best Spoken Word Album, for her autobiography, Society's Child, with a total of ten nominations in eight different categories.

Ian is also a columnist and science fiction author.

Born in Farmingdale, New Jersey, Ian was raised on a farm, and attended East Orange High School in East Orange, New Jersey, and the New York City High School of Music & Art.

"Society's Child" stigmatized Ian as a one-hit wonder until her most successful US single, "At Seventeen", was released in 1975.

"At Seventeen" is a bittersweet commentary on adolescent cruelty, the illusion of popularity and teenage angst, from the perspective of a narrator looking back on her earlier experience.

Ian appeared as the first musical guest on the series premiere of Saturday Night Live on October 11, 1975, performing "At Seventeen" and "In the Winter".

The album Between the Lines was also a smash and reached number one on Billboard′s album chart.

The album would be certified platinum for sales of over one million copies sold in the US.

The song was a major hit as it charted at no. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, hit number one on the Adult Contemporary chart and won the 1976 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Performance - Female, beating out Linda Ronstadt, Olivia Newton-John, Judy Collins and Helen Reddy.

Another country where Ian has achieved a high level of popularity is Japan: Ian had two Top 10 singles on the Japanese Oricon charts, "Love Is Blind" in 1976 and "You Are Love" in 1980.

Ian's 1976 album Aftertones also topped Oricon's album chart in October 1976.

Another measure of her success is anecdotal: on Valentine's Day 1977, Ian received 461 valentine cards, having indicated in the lyrics to "At Seventeen" that she never received one as a teenager.

"Fly Too High" (1979), produced by disco producer Giorgio Moroder, was Ian's contribution to the soundtrack of the Jodie Foster film Foxes and was also featured on Ian's 1979 album Night Rains.

It also became another international hit, reaching number one in many countries, including South Africa, Belgium, Australia, Israel and the Netherlands, and going gold or platinum in those countries and others.

Her first four albums were released on a double CD entitled Society's Child: The Verve Recordings in 1995.

In 2001, "Society's Child" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which honors recordings considered timeless and important to music history.

In her 2008 autobiography Society's Child, Ian recalls receiving hate mail and death threats as a response to the song and mentions that a radio station in Atlanta that played it was burned down.

According to Ian in a 2015 interview, she was told by her then manager that Cosby had interpreted their interaction as "lesbian" and as a result "had made it his business" to warn other television shows that Ian wasn't "suitable family entertainment" and "shouldn't be on television" because of her sexuality, thus attempting to blacklist her.

Although Ian would later come out, she states that at the time of the encounter with Cosby she had only been kissed once, by a boy she had a crush on, in broad daylight at summer camp.

Ian relates on her website that, although "Society's Child" was originally intended for Atlantic Records and the label paid for her recording session, Atlantic subsequently returned the master to her and quietly refused to release it.

Ian relates that years later, Atlantic's president at the time, Jerry Wexler, publicly apologized to her for this.