Music Monday: Janis Joplin

Keith Chaffee, Librarian, Collection Development,
photograph of Janis Joplin singing into a mic

Janis Joplin was born on January 19, 1943. Joplin was one of the most important rock singers of the late 1960s. Her recording career included only four albums, released in less than four years, but her style, personality, and voice have been influential on women in rock ever since.

Joplin began performing while she was a student at the University of Texas at Austin. The academic life did not suit her, and she moved to San Francisco in 1963. She began performing with local musicians there, occasionally making casual recordings with friends. She eventually came to the attention of the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and they invited her to join them in 1966.

The band had begun to attract attention outside San Francisco when their first album, Big Brother and the Holding Company, was released in 1967. It generated a few minor radio hits, all of which featured Joplin as lead singer; within a few months, new printings of the album had added "featuring Janis Joplin" to the cover.

Joplin was even more prominent on the band's 1968 album Cheap Thrills, which gave the band its biggest pop hit (and one of Joplin's signature songs), "Piece of My Heart." The band was now usually billed as "Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company," and the rest of the group had begun to resent the fact that Joplin was getting most of the media attention. By the end of 1968, other band members were making fun of Joplin during concerts; she left Big Brother in 1968.

She put together a new backup band, the Kozmic Blues Band, which was more influenced by R&B and featured a prominent horn section. This time, it was clear from the beginning that they were her backup musicians, and the 1969 album I Got Dem O'l Kozmic Blues Again Mama! carried only Joplin's name; she was now a solo act.

The Kozmic Blues Band only lasted for a year, but that year included Joplin's performance at the Woodstock music festival in August 1969. She had to wait backstage for several hours before going on, and calmed her nerves with alcohol and heroin. Pete Townshend, who performed with The Who later that night, later said that Woodstock was not her best performance, "but even Janis on an off night was incredible."

With a new backing band, Joplin began work on a new album in the fall of 1970. When she didn't show up for a recording session on October 4, her manager drove to her hotel to get her, and found her dead in her room. The cause of death was a heroin overdose. There was some speculation that she may have gotten an unusually potent batch of the drug, as some of her dealer's other customers had also recently overdosed.

Joplin had finished recording enough material that her final album, Pearl, was released posthumously in January 1971. It was her most successful album, and included her biggest single, "Me and Bobby McGee," which reached #1 on the charts.

Janis Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2013, and was pictured on a United States postage stamp in 2014. In addition to the albums linked above, several other collections of Joplin's music are available for streaming or download at Freegal. Her life is the subject of the documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue (streaming, DVD).


 

 

 

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