Janis Lyn Joplin, blues and
rock singer, daughter of Seth Ward and Dorothy (East) Joplin,
was born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas. She grew up
in a respectable middle-class home; her father was an engineer
and her mother a Sunday school teacher. The future queen of
nonconformity is remembered as a bright, pretty, and artistic
little girl. Signs of rebellion, however, against the religious,
sexual, and racial conservatism of her environment were evident
in junior high school, and by the time Janis graduated from
Jefferson High School in Port Arthur in 1960, her vocabulary of
four letter words, her outrageous clothes, and her reputation
for sexual promiscuity and drunkenness (signs of alcoholism were
already apparent) caused her classmates to call her a slut.
Bereft of friends, without dates for school dances, ashamed of
her acned face and overweight figure, Janis responded with
contempt and insults to cover the rejection that scarred her for
the rest of her life.
In her junior year she found
acceptance in a small group of Jefferson High beatniks who read
Jack Kerouac and roamed the nightspots from Port Arthur to New
Orleans, thus mining one of the motherlodes of American ethnic
music. There were Anglo, African American, Cajun, Mexican, and
Caribbean sounds. There were the lyrics and rhythms of country,
gospel, jazz, soul, and the blues. Janis did not read music, but
at the roadhouses or at home listening to records of Odetta,
Bessie Smith, or Willie Mae Thornton, she had an uncanny ability
to imitate the sounds she heard. Out of imitation there slowly
developed the timing, phrasing, inflections, and talent at
evoking changing moods that were the Joplin trademarks.
She found Lamar State College
of Technology at Beaumont no improvement over Port Arthur; she
was a rebel and a "nigger lover" in both places. She fled to the
University of Texas in Austin in the summer of 1962 to study
art. Indifferent to classwork, she found soulmates at the
Ghetto, a counterculture enclave, and got gigs around Austin,
most importantly at Threadgill's, a converted filling station
and late night hangout for lovers of music and nonstop partying.
The proprietor, country singer Kenneth Threadgill, offered Janis
encouragement and lifelong friendship.
Janis craved such acceptance,
but her nonconforming behavior often provoked rejection, as when
university fraternity pranksters nominated her as their
candidate in the annual Ugliest Man on Campus contest.
Characteristically, she laughed to cover the hurt, and dreamed
of San Francisco, where Beats and Hippies were not outsiders.
She spent 1963 to 1965 in the Bay area and won attention from
local audiences, until drugs became more important than singing
and reduced her to an emaciated eighty-eight pounds. Her friends
passed the hat and gave her a bus ticket home.
Parental care restored her
health, and fear of relapse produced a period of sobriety.
Business suits and bouffant hairdos announced conversion to the
Port Arthur ethos. But Janis's mind was torn: Port Arthur was
safe but dull. San Francisco offered both excitement and
potential self destruction. She made her decision after
receiving an offer to audition for a new rock band, Big Brother
and the Holding Company, and headed west in May 1966, toward
four years of meteoric fame—and death at age twenty-seven.
"Imagine a white girl singing
the blues like that!" they said of Big Brother's lead singer.
And Joplin's belting of rock gathered huge swaying, clapping,
shouting, and dancing audiences. For Janis a good audience was
an audience in motion, and her body joined her voice in pleading
for audience participation. She stopped the show at the Monterey
Pop Festival in 1967 with "Ball and Chain." That triumph and the
album
Cheap Thrills (1968) elevated her to national stardom. A
new manager, Albert Grossman, whose stable of stars included
Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan, urged Janis to dump Big
Brother for more versatile and disciplined support. The Kosmic
Blues band was never satisfactory; the Full Tilt Boogie band
was.
Joplin's career now surged
forward full tilt, driven by Southern Comfort booze, heroin,
bisexual liaisons, compulsive work, and the hope that fame would
bring inner peace. Success now meant concerts in Madison Square
Garden, Paris, London, Woodstock, and Harvard Stadium; adulation
in the New York Times; a guest appearance on the Ed Sullivan
show; and a six-figure salary.
Janis was ready in August 1970
to confront the Jefferson High classmates who had called her a
slut. Whether her primary purpose in attending the
tenth-anniversary class reunion was revenge, a desire to be
worshiped as a hero, or just a quest for acceptance is unclear.
What is certain is that she left Port Arthur feeling further
alienated from her classmates, her parents, and her hometown.
When she died two months later, on October 4, 1970, of an
accidental overdose of heroin and alcohol, her newly drawn will
required that her ashes be strewn over California soil.
The judgment of others has
been far kinder to Janis Joplin than she was to herself. She has
been called "the best white blues singer in American musical
history" and "the greatest female singer in the history of rock
'n' roll." Those who missed her live performances must judge her
from a relatively small number of albums, audiotapes, and
videotapes.
Pearl, an album recorded just before her death and
featuring "Me and Bobby McGee," shows that Janis was growing
musically almost to the moment of her death. The film The
Rose (1979), starring Bette Midler, is not faithful in
detail to Janis's life, but it captures her mesmerizing power on
stage, in contrast to her utter powerlessness offstage to halt
her relentless descent to self destruction. Janis's sad life
cannot be separated from her greatness; like Bessie Smith, the
great Afro American blues singer who also succumbed to alcohol
and drugs, Janis Joplin's tortured soul gave her blues the
authenticity of direct experience. After her death she was
finally accepted in the hometown she both loved and ridiculed.
In 1988 some 5,000 people from Port Arthur, tears in their eyes,
sang "Me and Bobby McGee" as a bust of Janis Joplin was
unveiled. It now sits in a Port Arthur library. In the 2000s
Port Arthur's Museum of the Gulf Coast featured Joplin among its
exhibits and she was an inductee in the Gulf Coast Music Hall of
Fame. Port Arthur holds a birthday bash every January in
celebration of the singer.
In the decades after her
death, various Joplin anthologies and live recordings were
released as well as numerous biographies. In 1992 her sister,
Laura Joplin, published Love, Janis, a collection of
letters Janis wrote to her family beginning in 1963. A play with
the same title and based on the book opened in Denver in 1995
and subsequently had a long run at the Zachary Scott Theater in
Austin in summer 1997. The performance opened off Broadway in
April 2001 and ran to January 5, 2003. Janis Joplin was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1995. In 2005
she was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ellis
Amburn,
Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions
of Janis Joplin: A Biography (New
York: Warner, 1992). Myra Friedman,
Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin
(New York: Harmony, 1992). Laura Joplin,
Love, Janis (New York: Villard,
1992). Larry Willoughby, Texas
Rhythm and Texas Rhyme: A Pictorial History of Texas Music
(Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1984).
Richard B. Hughes
- Handbook of Texas
Online, s.v. ","
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/JJ/fjo69.html
(accessed March 3, 2008).
(NOTE: "s.v." stands for sub verbo, "under the word.")
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