Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin was an American rock singer and songwriter whose six-year commercial career — abruptly ended by her October 4, 1970 heroin-overdose death at age 27 — produced one of the defining 1960s American rock-and-blues vocal performances. She was born Janis Lyn Joplin on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas, into a Texas working-class family. Her father Seth Ward Joplin was a Texaco refinery engineer and her mother Dorothy Bonita East was a registrar at a local business college. The Port Arthur high-school environment — where she was bullied for her unconventional appearance and outspoken political views — shaped her subsequent later autobiographical narrative.

Her education at Lamar State College of Technology (Beaumont, Texas, 1960) and the University of Texas at Austin (1962–1963; without earning a degree) launched her early-career Texas-area folk-and-blues club performances. Her 1963 first San Francisco residency and her subsequent 1965 second San Francisco residency at the North Beach Coffee Gallery launched her 1966 audition with the San Francisco Bay Area band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Her 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival performance with Big Brother and the Holding Company — across the June 17, 1967 Saturday-evening Monterey Pop Festival set — launched her American rock-music public profile. The 1968 album Cheap Thrills (with Big Brother) — which sold over one million copies — produced her single "Piece of My Heart" and her 1969 transition to her own touring band the Kozmic Blues Band.

Her 1969 Woodstock Festival performance — at the August 17, 1969 Sunday-morning festival set — produced her American 1960s rock public profile. Her subsequent 1970 transition to her final touring band the Full Tilt Boogie Band produced her posthumous-released 1971 album Pearl — which contained her single "Me and Bobby McGee" (the Kris Kristofferson-Fred Foster-composed song that became her career's only US Billboard Hot 100 number-one single, eight months after her death). She died on October 4, 1970, at age 27, in the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, Los Angeles, of a heroin-overdose-induced cardiac arrest.

Her name Janis derives from the English form of Jane (from the Hebrew Yochanan meaning "God is gracious"). Janis was a popular American girls' name through the 1940s and 1950s.