The Janis Ian Archives Fund

The Janis Ian Archives are a unique resource for music history research, offering unfettered access to Ian’s publishing, recording, and live performance contracts, copyright paperwork, financial negotiations, and tax returns. Beginning with her grandparents’ immigration papers, circa 1916, the Archives will follow the journey of Ian’s 1937 Martin D-18 guitar, chronicle the HUAC years with insights into her parents’ FBI files (and what FBI surveillance cost Ian’s family over the decades), and then travel through the civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQ movements. Visitors to the Archives can view Janis Ian’s correspondence with other musical artists, famous friends, and collaborators, as well as flip through song notebooks, diaries, and a journal that includes Ian’s first poem, written at age ten.

Ongoing support is needed to preserve, catalog, and periodically display the priceless items housed in this vital one-of-a-kind resource. Unlike most archives, this resource is open for professionals and non-professionals alike. While many artists have received significant amounts of money for turning over their archives, The Janis Ian Archives are entirely different – Ian’s belief in Berea College is so strong that she has donated all materials without compensation. Her only stipulation is that records remain open to the public, not just scholars and Ph.D. candidates.

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I played an album a lot in one of those bad years – a couple of those bad years. In those years – I’m thinking of ’75 and ’76 – there was the Bicentennial and my awkward attempts at relevance. The album was by Janis Ian [Between the Lines] and it played and it played and I listened and I could hear the storyteller and the great singer, and I could sense pages turning and lives changing, and there was fog in the distance. She had fog in her stories – much had been created and much was being shared – but the fog didn’t make it to my shores, although it made it to my heart. It’s a remarkable album – one of the many albums I destroyed from overuse. The album popped and crackled and skipped, but I kept it dropping and re-playing, and it was a marvel. Play it. Play it a lot. There are stories and women in there.

Tennessee Williams

How to Get Involved

Support The Janis Ian Archives through the fund or contact Teresa Kash Davis at daviste@berea.edu or 859-985-3132 with questions regarding monetary and non-monetary contributions to The Janis Ian Archives.

If you wish to donate via personal check, please include “The Janis Ian Archives Fund” in the memo line, and mail to:

Berea College
CPO 2216
Berea, KY 40404

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…Knowledge is the greatest gift you can offer.

Janis Ian and Pat Snyder