Please, what is the title of this song, and the artist who performed it?
Thanks.
It was Janis Ian, and the song is called “At 17.” She was something of a teenage folkie star, but this was her only major adult hit.
One of the finest odes to adolescent self-pity ever recorded 
Catrandom
Thanks!
I thought it went,
“I learned the truth at seventeen, a girl must keep her privates clean…” 
“…send lawyers, guns, and money…”
Warren ZevonI have the sheet music to this - I was definitely angst-ridden back then.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who remembers this song.
It was one of my favorites when I was… uh never mind how old I was.
Ayesha
You were pretty young, Ayesha. Janis Ian and I are close in age and you are younger than we are.
(I’ve admitted to middle age from the day I turned 40, but I’m not old (yet).)
Tom~
Didn’t she also sing that song that went “Home of the brave, land of the free, why can’t they let him be what he wants to be?”?
Geez, talk about bringin’ back memories . . . .
Pointless but true Janis Ian story!
My guitar teacher was a semi famous session player in Nashville and New York, and played on one of Janis Ian’s late sixties records, he said she was only like ninteen at the time(!?).
Anyway, the check he got for his work bounced and he fumes over it, then one night, years later, he finds she’s in his town doing a small gig.
He smooth talks his way into the backstage of the club (they knew him) and swipes her big old acustic guitar and beats a hasty retreat stage left.
Years later he’s feeling guilty about it (he really is a nice guy actually) and tries to find her to return it, but this is long before the internet, and Verve records had folded, and she’s long since faded into obscurity, and rumor was that a friend’s brother’s cousin had heard that she had died during surgery for a stomach thing in Florida etc. etc…
Cut to 1995. Janis Ian turns out to be alive and well and promoting a new album at a local radio station. My teacher, now to sick to leave home, asks me and another student to go there and return it for him. “Sure” we say…
I think it’s still mouldering in my attic.
Well I did say it’s a pointless story…
“At 17” was featured in Acoustic Guitar Magazine a few months ago, along with a nice article about Janice. She’s making a comback of sorts. She was also one of the first pop L_______ long before Ethridge came along.
Indeed – the record was top 10 in 1975.
Catrandom
True, but I think she came out many, many years after her last popularity.
Janis Ian is a Legionnaire? You don’t say. My goodness, you learn something new every day, don’t you.
Plunging like stones from a slingshot on Mars.
It was also the tune sung by the contestants of the (IIRC) Little Miss Springfield pagent (sponsored by Laramie cigarettes). I think it was also used in another Simpsons episode but can’t verify.
I haven’t heard it anywhere else but the Simpsons, which tells you how old I am.
Mojo, even us old codgers like The Simpsons. Knowing all the lyrics to At 17 made the song even more ironic but it wasn’t the little miss Springfield pageant, it was one the family was watching on TV.
IIRC the music (but not lyrics) was used in the space coyote/Guatemalan insanity pepper episode when Homer was forlornly looking for his soul mate.