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'Janis Lyn Joplin' (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an influential singer, songwriter, and music arranger. She rose to fame in the 1960's as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and eventually a solo career before her death from a drug overdose. She was one of the most popular and influential singers of the sixties and is considered to be one of the greatest female rockers of all time. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Joplin #46 on their list of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time.^[1]

Contents

Life and career

Early life

University

Ill-fated first stint In San Francisco and return home

Big Brother and The Holding Company

Solo career: Woodstock to ''Festival Express''

Very Different From Hippies And Deadheads

''Pearl''

Relapse and death

Legacy

Discography

Trivia

See also

References

Further reading

Samples

External links

Life and career

Early life

Janis Joplin was born to Seth Ward Joplin and Dorothy Bonita East.^[2] Her father was an engineer at Texaco. Her mother was the registrar at a business college. Janis had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. As a teenager, she befriended a group of outcasts, including Jim Langdon and Grant Lyons, the latter of whom played her the blues for the first time. She began singing in the local choir and listening to musicians such as Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Odetta, and Big Mama Thornton. While at Thomas Jefferson High School, she was mostly shunned. Among her high school classmates was another individual destined for stardom: future college and NFL coach Jimmy Johnson. In a 1992 ''Sports Illustrated'' profile of his career, Johnson claimed that he gave Janis the high school nickname of "beat weeds." Primarily a painter, in high school she first began singing blues and folk music with friends.

University

Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended the University of Texas at Austin, though she never obtained a degree. She lived in a building commonly referred to as "The Ghetto" which was located at 2812 1/2 Nueces Street. The rent was $40 a month when she lived there. The campus newspaper ran a profile of her in 1962 headlined "She Dares To Be Different."

Ill-fated first stint In San Francisco and return home

Cultivating a rebellious manner that could be viewed as "liberated," Joplin styled herself in part after her female blues heroines and, in part, after the Beat poets. She left Texas for San Francisco in 1963, lived in North Beach and in Haight-Ashbury as well as