1966 Folk Classic, Banned by Some Radio Stations, Became an Era-Defining Anthem
Janis Ian released "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)" in 1966. It took a year to crack the Top 20 on Billboard's Hot 100 - and by the time it did, the then-16-year-old was already being boycotted and chanted off the stage.
Ian had written the song three years earlier, at just 13. Her debut single was about a White girl in love with a Black guy and a society that refused to accept it.
Being a hit didn't protect her from the backlash. Some club owners turned her away fearing violence would break out. Several radio stations refused to play the song because they thought she was "too young" to be singing about such things.
But nothing could have prepared her for what happened at the Valley Music Theater in Encino, California. It was only her fourth or fifth concert. A few songs in, the room turned.
"When I started 'Society's Child,' these people started yelling," she recalled in the documentary Janis Ian: Breaking Silence. "And I thought they were yelling something nice ‘cause on stage you can't really hear what people are yelling very clearly. But I realized they were all yelling 'N---- lover!' at me."
She tried to push through it, but the chanting only got louder. "I knew that I was going to start to cry, and I didn't want them to see me cry," she said. So she set her guitar down, walked off stage and went to the restroom. "I just didn't know what I was supposed to do."
Eventually the promoter came looking for her. He had been in the box office during the whole thing and had no idea what had happened. When she told him, he didn't sugarcoat his response.
"He said, ‘Well, you don't leave the stage because somebody calls you a name,'" she recalled. They went back and forth for what felt like forever. Then something he said finally got to her. "I can't believe the girl who wrote that song is a coward."
Ian's grandparents were Jewish Russian immigrants who had sacrificed everything to come to America. If they could handle that, she could handle this. "Who was I to leave the stage?" she said. She went back out, picked up her guitar and kept singing.
The ushers made their way through the crowd with flashlights, shining them on the hecklers. The manager kicked them out, and Ian later learned that those roughly 20 people had come that night specifically to intimidate her.
"It was a life changing moment for me," Ian said. "Because I realized for the first time that the song didn't just have the power to make people angry, but it had the power to make people stand up and stand up for what they believe. And that was a huge deal, that music could do that. I think that was a large part of what set me on my course."
It would be eight years before Ian had another major hit. "At Seventeen" came out in 1975 when she was in her early twenties, yet she wrote about the pain of not fitting in as a teenager so convincingly that it resonated with a whole generation. It reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and won her a Grammy.
Related: 1963 Folk Classic, Banned by Some Radio Stations, Became a Generational Anthem
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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 5:01 PM.