Singer Janis Ian Walked Off Stage and Sobbed over Crowd's Racist Response to Her Controversial Interracial-Romance Hit

• Singer-songwriter Janis Ian had a Top 20 hit at age 16 with her 1966 debut single "Society's Child"

• The song, written from the point of view of a young girl involved in an interracial romance, sparked controversy over its lyrical content

• Ian enjoyed an even bigger hit in 1975 with the coming-of-age anthem "At Seventeen," which won a Grammy

Singer-songwriter Janis Ian is best known for her 1975 Top 10 single "At Seventeen," but at 16, she became a different kind of teen pop star. The year was 1967, and Ian soared into the Top 20 of Billboard's Hot 100 with a song she wrote at 13 called "Society's Child (Baby I've Been Thinking)."

The track, which was her first single, tackled the then fairly taboo subject of interracial romance from the point of view of a White girl dealing with the world's racist reaction to to her relationship with a Black guy. While the song was a hit, the subject matter put Ian at the center of controversy. Some club owners refused to book her out of fear of violence, and in the new documentary Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, she recalls one show at Valley Music Theater in Encino, Calif. — "probably my fourth or fifth time on a concert stage" — where she got a lot more than she thought she could handle.

Four or five songs into her set, mayhem broke out.

"When I started 'Society’s Child,' these people started yelling," Ian, who will turn 74 on April 7, recalls. "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. I didn’t know if it was 10 or 20 people or if it was the majority of the audience. It became this horrible, almost prayer-like chant."

She tried to block out the noise and focus on singing, but the chanting grew louder and louder. "I knew that I was going to start to cry, and I didn’t want them to see me cry." she says. "So I put down my guitar on the stage, and I walked off stage, and I went to the restroom, and I started to cry. I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do."

Related: Janis Ian Says She May Never 'Sound Like Myself Again' amid Laryngitis Diagnosis

After a while, the promoter, who had been in the box-office and missed the commotion in the crowd, came into the bathroom and asked her why she wasn't on stage. After she explained what had happened, he delivered some tough words.

"He said, ‘Well, you don’t leave the stage because somebody calls you a name," Ian remembers. "People were getting shot. People were getting knifed. People were disappearing. Freedom riders were getting killed. It was civil war. And I didn’t want to die. I really didn’t want to die. We argued for quite a while. It felt like years. And he finally said something like, ‘I can’t believe the girl who wrote that song is a coward.’ "

Ian, the granddaughter of Jewish Russian immigrants, thought of everything her family had endured before coming to the United States. (Ian was born Janis Eddy Fink in Farmingdale, N.J.) "Who was I to leave the stage"? she decided. "So I went back on stage, and I picked up my guitar, and I started to sing again, and I thought, ‘Okay, here I am.’ And I made it my business to keep singing the song, get through the show."

The chanting continued, and the ushers came in and shined their flashlights on the people who were making the noise so the audience could see who they were. The theater manager then threw them out. Ian later realized that the 20-odd people who had created the ruckus had come to the concert for the express purpose of intimidating her. In the end, she was more affected by the people in the crowd and on staff who stood up to the hecklers.

"It was a life changing moment for me," Ian says. "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."

Seven years after "Society's Child," Ian scored again with another anthem: "At Seventeen." Though she was in her early twenties when it became a hit in 1975, she perfectly captured the complicated feeling of being on the cusp of adulthood and not quite fitting in. The song went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, won Ian a Grammy and became one of the defining hits of the '70s.

In the documentary, Celine Dion, Laurie Metcalf and Jean Smart all pay homage to "At Seventeen," which Ian performed on the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975.

"I played the hell out of that record," Metcalf says in the documentary. "It was so specific and so relevant for generations of women. To this day, it affects me the same way as when I first heard it."

Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is now playing in select theaters.

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