Janis Joplin

Singer

• Born: January 19, 1943
• Birthplace: Port Arthur, Texas
• Died: October 4, 1970
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

American rock singer

Joplin, one of the prime movers in the evolution of rock and roll, had a singing voice that showed an emotional intensity reminiscent of great African American singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas. Her father worked as a mechanical engineer, and her mother was a registrar at a business college. In spite of her conventional family background, Joplin was a rebel from an early age. As a teenager, she withdrew from high school social life and spent much of her time listening to the music of black artists such as Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, and Odetta. Her taste in reading, like her taste in music, set her apart from her peers.

Port Arthur is in the heart of the Texas Bible Belt. Joplin acquired such a reputation in this ultraconservative community that the citizens were still speaking of her in horrified whispers years after her death. Even while still in junior high school, she scandalized the townspeople with her sexual promiscuity. Her classmates rejected her and called her filthy names; they threw pennies at her as a way of symbolizing that they considered her a whore. Joplin felt badly hurt by this rejection, but she built a facade of individualism and indifference that was to remain her outstanding characteristic.

It is evident that Joplin was overcompensating for feelings of inferiority resulting in part from being overweight, feeling physically unattractive, and being harshly criticized by her mother. Joplin had an insatiable craving for love and belonging that was partly responsible for her legendary sexual promiscuity in later life as well as her consumption of liquor, marijuana, and heroin.

At seventeen, she left home with the intention of earning a living with her voice. She hitchhiked around the country, scraping up money by getting short-term jobs as a folksinger. Eventually, she made it to California, where she attended several colleges but never graduated. In California, she lived in hippie communes, indulged in group sex, and was introduced to new kinds of drugs.

This was the very beginning of the 1960’s, which will always have a place in American history as a period of youthful rebellion against the beliefs and traditions of older generations. At first, Joplin found the lifestyle of California too much for her, and she returned to Texas to try to live a conventional life. She realized, however, that she had outgrown Port Arthur completely, and she went back to the West Coast. The most important event in her life soon occurred when she was asked to become the “chick singer” with a new San Francisco rock-and-roll group called Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Life’s Work

Big Brother and the Holding Company has its place in popular music history because of its connection with the dynamic Joplin. Her first public appearance with this group was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco on June 10, 1966. She was twenty-three years old but had done more living than many people do in their lifetimes.

Partly because of her early adulation of the great Bessie Smith, Joplin had developed the ability to put her heart and soul into her singing. She was also gifted with a voice that had an enormous range and variety of tones. Big Brother and the Holding Company’s instrumentalists helped her to discover her true niche as a singer, and in turn she helped the musicians to define themselves as a group.

Joplin’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967 is legendary. She electrified the huge audience with the intensity of her performance. Older, much better known groups were totally overshadowed by the dynamic new sound. Music critics were unanimous in their enthusiastic praise of this new female vocalist.

Joplin attained national stardom in 1968 with the release of Cheap Thrills, her second album with Big Brother and the Holding Company. The album hit number one on the best-seller charts and stayed there for eight weeks. Joplin made a clean sweep of Jazz and Pop magazine’s awards, winning the International Critics Poll for Best Female Vocal Album and Best Female Pop Singer as well as the magazine’s Reader’s Poll for Best Female Pop Singer. However, Joplin had developed an insatiable lust for success. She was no longer satisfied with the musicians who were backing her up, and she announced that she was leaving them to form her own backup group.

Joplin was a victim of a scourge that has destroyed the lives of many popular musicians. When musicians speak of the rigors of the “music scene,” they are referring not only to the music but also to the destructive lifestyle that goes with it, including drinking, drugs, and association with a criminal element that is attracted to nightclubs and bars. Among these criminals are those who make their living selling illicit drugs, and they are forever trying to recruit new customers. At first, Joplin used heroin because she thought it inspired her to be more creative and uninhibited. Ultimately, she was killed by her use of the same drug that destroyed the lives of such great musicians as Charlie Parker and Elvis Presley.

Joplin was one of the star attractions of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, and she had a huge success when she toured Europe. At the end of 1969, she won Jazz and Pop magazine’s International Critics Poll, which named her Best Female Pop Singer for the year. Ironically, as her career skyrocketed, she became more and more depressed and self-destructive.

Just a few days before her death, Joplin attended a reunion of her highschool class at Port Arthur. She expected to return in triumph to the people who had made her so unhappy as a teenager; however, she found that most of the townspeople were unimpressed by her success and still despised her for the way she was living. This disappointment had a powerful impact on the singer and may have led to her death. On Sunday, October 4, 1970, her body was discovered in the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood. The autopsy confirmed the story that was already apparent from the hypodermic needle marks all over both of her arms: She had died of an overdose of heroin.

Joplin’s best and most successful record album, Pearl (which became her nickname), was released shortly after her death. It immediately placed number one on the Billboard chart. Her rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson, was also released as a single and reached number one in that category as well. It remains her most famous song. The royalties from those two records would have made her a millionaire if she had lived.

Eighteen years after Joplin’s death, her picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The Time article states, “Janis Joplin expressed one side of 1968 fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe.” Joplin was to become a symbol of the “sixties generation” in her music, lifestyle, language, clothing, and hairstyle, and unfortunately in her self-destructive use of drugs and alcohol.

Significance

In her short lifetime, Joplin was one of the foremost personalities in defining the so-called sixties generation, a generation that made a more powerful impact on popular culture than has any other generation before or since. She was one of a very few women to make it to superstardom in the male-dominated world of popular music. Called “the high priestess of the rock scene,” Joplin was a leader in asserting women’s right to sexual freedom. She helped to popularize a new kind of liberated music a fusion of blues, country, and other styles that has since become the leading wave of popular music around the world. Millions of young women imitated her behavior and her highly individualistic clothing styles, outraging their parents and forcing the older generation to reexamine its traditional attitudes.

Joplin, like many of her youthful contemporaries, was opposed to the undeclared war the United States was waging in Vietnam because it involved ecological devastation and indiscriminate human slaughter. She hated racial discrimination and regarded American involvement in Vietnam as a form of neocolonialism.

The unrest of the 1960’s was largely a result of the feeling that the world was doomed to inevitable destruction by atomic holocaust and that the war in Vietnam was only a prelude to the final disaster. The United States and the Soviet Union continued adding to their atomic arsenals until both nations possessed enough of the weapons to destroy humanity several times over. As one of the leaders of the so-called youth rebellion of the 1960’s, Joplin was instrumental in forcing the federal government to look for a way out of a conflict that was tearing the country apart.

One of Joplin’s greatest contributions to the cause of women was that she demonstrated that women not only could be electrifying performers but also could lead bands, create new and innovative styles, and generate huge incomes, all while living the lifestyles they wished to live. After Joplin’s tremendous success, record companies became more willing to give promising women the opportunity to achieve a high level of commercial success and artistic control.

Unfortunately, the fun-loving, high-spirited young singer also set a bad example for millions of young women with her use of drugs and alcohol. Joplin’s death from an overdose of heroin served as an object lesson to many of her admirers; the consumption of heroin in the United States decreased dramatically after her death. Like the deaths of other folk heroes of the period, including comedian Lenny Bruce, Joplin’s death served as a grim reminder that substance abuse destroys youth and talent without pity. “If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy,” said Billie Holiday, one of America’s greatest singers. “It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.”

Bibliography

Amburn, Ellis. Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin. New York: Warner Books, 1992. This is the best available full-length biography of Joplin. Discusses her early childhood, her development as a vocalist, her numerous love affairs with both men and women, and her self-destructive lifestyle. Contains an excellent bibliography. Thoroughly indexed. Contains many photographic illustrations of Joplin and friends, including one famous picture of Joplin in the nude.

Caserta, Peggy, as told to Dan Knapp. Going Down with Janis. Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1973. Discusses Joplin’s private life, her use of drugs, and her sexuality, written by a woman with whom she had a long-term relationship.

Dalton, David. Piece of My Heart: The Life, Times, and Legend of Janis Joplin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. A collection of interviews and personal impressions by a friend who accompanied Joplin on many of her tours. Written in an informal, expressionistic style.

Echols, Alice. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999. Based on more than 150 interviews, Echols’s book places Joplin within the context of the psychedelic 1960’s and the era’s preconceptions about women.

Freidman, Myra. Buried Alive. New York: William Morrow, 1973. An early biography written by a woman who was Joplin’s press agent and close personal friend. This deeply moving work explains Joplin’s manic, self-destructive behavior as a compensation for her belief that she was ugly and unlovable.

Joplin, Laura. “Love, Janis.” Rolling Stone, September 3, 1992. An article based on a collection of letters written by Joplin to members of her family during the 1960’s. Laura Joplin is Janis’s sister.

Wakefield, Dan. “Kosmic Blues.” The Atlantic, September, 1973. A highly intelligent, eulogistic article about Joplin based on a review of two published biographies: Going Down with Janis and Buried Alive.

Wolf, Mark. “The Uninhibited Janis Joplin.” Down Beat, September, 1989. A good profile of Joplin that covers her life from her childhood in Port Arthur to the time she joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in San Francisco. Contains illustrations of historical interest.

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