Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin (1943-1970), American rock singer, considered by many to be the greatest white female blues artist of all time. Born to a middle-class family in Port Arthur, Texas, she ran away from home at the age of 17 to sing folk music in clubs in the Texas cities of Austin and Houston. In 1963 she hitchhiked to California, where she witnessed the birth of the student and hippie movements. Joplin sang folk and blues in clubs in San Francisco and Venice, a Los Angeles beach community. She returned to Texas in 1966 to sing in a country-and-western band, but returned to San Francisco that same year to join a blues band called Big Brother and the Holding Company.

In 1967 the group appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, one of the earliest large-scale rock festivals, and Joplin became an overnight star. Her singing, documented in the film Monterey Pop (1969),was characterized as raw, vulnerable, and explosive. Albert Grossman, the manager of American folk singer Bob Dylan, became Joplin’s manager and she and her band signed with Columbia Records.

In 1968 Columbia released the album Cheap Thrills, which topped the Billboard magazine popular music charts for eight weeks, yielding the hit single “Piece of My Heart.” The album, which includes such songs as “Ball and Chain” and “Turtle Blues,” became one of the best-loved recordings in rock history. Also in 1968 Joplin left Big Brother and the Holding Company, striking out on her own and forming two backup groups, the Kozmic Blues Band and Full Tilt Boogie.

In 1969 Joplin recorded her final completed album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again, Mama, which featured the song “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder).” She was working on her next release when she died the following year of a heroin overdose. The unfinished record, called Pearl (Joplin’s nickname), was released in 1971 and showed a new direction in her work. She had begun singing in a lighter, less frantically intense manner, especially in such songs as “Mercedes Benz” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” a song written by singer Kris Kristofferson that became Joplin’s first number-one single on the pop charts. In 1979 Bette Midler starred in The Rose, a motion picture widely thought to be based on Joplin’s life. Joplin was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.