About halfway through Janis Ian's performance at the "Rev Up, Wrap Up" session that traditionally closes out the annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA), an audience member yelled out, "You're really funny."
"I'm not supposed to be funny," Ian replied. "Don't spread that around—you're supposed to leave here with deep thoughts."
"Rev Up, Wrap Up" is intended to both close out the ALA conference and get attendees excited for the next one. Ian began the performance by speaking at length about her lifelong love of libraries, brought on at an early age by her parents, both of whom were schoolteachers and activists, and a librarian, Mrs. Baker, in her childhood home of East Orange, N.J.
Mrs. Baker took Ian under her wing and regularly provided her with lists of books that she needed to read. She'd let Ian use her library card, since kids were allowed to check out only three books at a time. By introducing her to so many different views of the world, "Mrs. Baker saved my life as an artist," Ian said. The lists of recommended readings continued until Mrs. Baker's death a few years back.
Ian also discussed her career's debt to her parents' activism. It got Victor and Pearl Fink into trouble with the law many times, so the family moved frequently. They were living in Encino, Calif., when Ian, at age 13, wrote the song "Society's Child (Baby, I've been Thinking)," about an interracial romance. "You can imagine how popular that made me," said Ian.
At one singing engagement, hecklers laid into Ian with racial epitaphs, and she ran into the bathroom crying. The club owner came into the bathroom and urged her to go back to the stage.
"I cannot believe the girl who wrote that song would be a coward," the owner said.
Ian returned to the stage, and the heckling resumed. "But then these 16-year-old ushers began shining their flashlights in their faces," she said. "As they were escorted out, they weren't walking out, they were slinking out, like cowards."
The power of music, she added, turned the ushers into heroes.
Ian won her second Grammy in 2013 for Best Spoken Word Album for "Society's Child: My Autobiography," beating out entries from Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Rachel Maddow and Ellen DeGeneres. She poked fun at her vanity many times throughout the performance, discussing when she let her partner of several years, Patricia Snyder—a.k.a, "Mr. Lesbian," from Ian's Advocate columns—read the manuscript of the autobiography. For several days, Snyder was uncharacteristically silent, until Ian broke down and asked what she thought about the book.
"I realized what it is that's been keeping us together all these years," Snyder said. "We both love you."
Before closing with her most famous song, "At Seventeen," Ian urged the attendee to not become discouraged by the knocks so many librarians have to take in this era of shrinking budgets and staff reductions. She said artists are essentially "alchemists," and many need the stimulation of a library to help them create.
"When you are tired of everything, remember that there is a child coming to your library who is like I was," Ian said.
