"She was always talking about how ugly she was. 'I'm so ugly' she'd say, or, 'You think I'm ugly don't you?' and she'd say how in school they thought she was just an ugly girl of no significance, ugly and loud."

Janis Lyn Joplin the first child born to Seth and Dorothy Joplin in Port Arthur, Texas on January 19, 1943. By all family accounts, Janis was an early bloomer; displaying fine motor skills at six months of age, walking at one year, mastering reading before entering school.

Janis displayed exceptional skills at drawing and while in the third grade Seth Joplin arranged private art lessons for her. Some of her early oil paintings remain on display within the extended Joplin households.
No hint of her future interest in singing revealed itself in Janis' early years.

As the child and teenager of her times Janis was expected to comply with the social norms for behavior and attitude. She was, as remembered, a very dutiful child to her parents and both of her parents were considered liberal, encouraging her never ending questioning and self discovery.

But by the time Janis entered her senior year at Thomas Jefferson High in Port Arthur, Texas things had changed for the once "happy" and effervescent Janis. She was overweight, she had bad skin. She had her own ideas about things and she questioned everything.

At school she was considered an outcast, "defiant", "deviant", "loose."
She was teased and mocked by others. Her classmates favorite name for her was "pig."

Janis began her drinking early. She befriended the other outcasts in school and even at this early stage in her life "partied hard." She and her friends frequently crossed state lines to carouse bars; these forays into the "seedy" side often ending in wild fights and other risky behavior.

Indeed Janis had begun to rebel against societal dictates and hypocrisies. She became more defiant, louder, leaned more toward riskiness unheard of for young girls of her era. Parents would warn their children not to associate with her. Teachers insisted Mr. and Mrs. Joplin "do something" about Janis.

The more increasingly restrictive and accusatory people and her environment became, the louder and more defiant Janis got. The pain of the experience's in this stage of Janis' life, and the "strangling" feeling she had felt in Port Arthur in general, would not only cause her lifetime pain and anxiety but it would come back to haunt many people.

Those very same people whom had participated in the mistreatment and indifference.

While still in her sophomore year, while everyone else was listening strictly to rock and roll, Janis was listening to Jazz, Folk, and Blues. Everyone would say that Janis was born for the Blues. She was mesmerized by Leadbelly and Odetta. And through singing along to their tunes, she discovered her ability to sing.

In 1960 Janis graduated from Thomas Jefferson High and made plans to enter Lamar college in Beaumont. But in 1961 Janis had convinced her parents to pay for a move to Los Angeles, where Mrs. Joplin had a sister. Janis would stay with her for awhile, get a break from Port Arthur, and put her life in perspective.

"Janis was super sensitive to human frailty, both to notice it and to soothe it. She never caused a hurt in somebody who was vulnerable."

In 1962, Janis Joplin cut her very first singing recording. It was for a bank commercial in Nacogdoches. The tune was set to Woody Guthrie's "This land is your land":

"This bank is your bank,
this bank is my bank,
from Nacogdoches
to the Gulf Coast water.
Sixty years of savings,
sixty years of earnings,
this bank was made for you and me."

Janis also returned to Lamar college in 1962. She got a waitress job, lost weight, wore makeup and dresses, wore her hair in the fashionable feminine styles of the time. It certainly appeared as if California had done what it was meant to do for Janis. But the change was short lived.

On an early road trip to Austin, Janis discovered her love for the city and decided to relocate. But she fared no better socially in Austin than she had in Port Arthur. People in Austin found her loud too. At the University of Texas they found her gruff, unkempt and provoking. And Janis drank. She could really drink. And she smoked "weed."

To Janis, she seemed not to fit anywhere and nobody really fit her.

The final straw of undoing came from the University of Texas student body, who nominated Janis for The "Ugliest Man on Campus award."

She had desperately tried to fit in somewhere as Janis. But her wild hair, bare feet, unkempt style of dress and her loud, bawdy, and seeming masculine behavior created nothing but indifference and disdain. She simply wasn't like any one. And no matter how she tried to conform, even in the slightest ways, it just wasn't who Janis truly was.

In January of 1963, Janis had had enough. She wanted out. Out of Texas. Out of her past. Along with friend Chet Helms (briefly of Big Brother), Janis Joplin stood on the side of the road, stuck out her thumb, and hitched rides all the way "out" to San Francisco.

Arriving fifty hours later, filthy and beaten up by the road, Janis walked into a little place called the Coffee and Confusion in North Beach. She immediately got on stage and sang her heart out. Janis began singing for a time in different clubs, getting a few odd jobs here and there but mostly existing on the dole.

But word spread around North Beach fast about the girl who could "burn out the spine" with her voice.

No one is completely sure when or where Janis began her affair with heroin. By some accounts from those who knew her in Austin in 1963, Janis was experimenting with the drug even then. But San Francisco literally opened up an entirely new world of drugs to an already vulnerable Janis. It was fast, it was easy, and many times it was free.

But in the summer of 1965, Janis returned to Port Arthur and the haven of her parents. She told many people that her experiences with drugs in California had terrified her. She sought the advice of psychiatrists, even planned briefly to be married; which would to Janis' heartbreak, never happen.

Janis confided to many that she was lonely, scared and unable to adjust; asking her father "Is this all there is?"

" When the show was over, she asked me, 'Did you get what I was saying?'
How could... what was that all about?
Janis answered, 'I was trying to tell you that I want you to let me know when I'm ahead so I can quit!' "

Janis began singing again a few times around Port Arthur and at a 1966 Austin benefit for blues musician Teodar Jackson. People remember her smooth, clear, "pretty" style of singing then. "Not like the way she sings now", many would say shortly after her rise to notoriety.

Janis confided in her Port Arthur psychiatric social worker, Bernard Giarritano, that she was burning to sing but felt uncertain how she could do that without destroying herself. "Afraid of how the pull of the drugs" of the scene "would eventually suck me back in."

It was indeed a prophetic fear. Many people around Port Arthur agreed aloud after her death, that "she was successful here", but had "left to do something that killed her."

In June of 1966, Janis inevitably returned to San Francisco. She would not return again to Port Arthur to live. Her voice was finally bursting it's seams, and she would be discovered by way of Big Brother and the Holding Company.

She was approached by Elektra Records around this time with a contract. But Janis was initially unaware the contract was extended to her only, not to Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Her possible departure from the band threatened to disband them altogether, creating tension and mistrust between them all. But Janis stayed on and she and the Holding Company went on to perform at the infamous Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. A festival that was never before like it, with thirty major performing artists on one stage over the course of three electrical days.

Albert Grossman, notoriously shrewd manager to Bob Dylan, also happened at the Monterrey Pop Festival. By all accounts privy to the information, Grossman wasn't interested in Big Brother either, only Janis. But to get Janis, he agreed to take on the Holding Company too and Grossman would subsequently get Janis and Big Brother signed to Columbia Records.

Janis' career moved fast, and so did the changes. Fame didn't cure Janis and she continued to heavily drink. She still struggled with her addiction to heroin though by some accounts she wasn't "using' as much then. The recollections of her drug use around this time are subjective; one old friend stating she stayed clean while another claiming to "know that she regularly used."

There was a clause in the contract with Columbia that all band members had to agree to, including Janis, which stipulated "No band member will ever touch or dabble in the drug heroin." All signed the agreement. However, heroin is hardly a "social" drug and any heroin use by Janis at this stage was more than likely hidden even if done so at times, right in plain sight.

The last time she performed with Big Brother and the Holding Company was at Hunter College in early November 1968. They had released two albums together; Big Brother and the Holding Company and Cheap Thrills. But Albert Grossman had different ideas for Janis.

After that last performance Janis would now join with a new six member instrument band called "Kosmic Blues Band", a band driven by a strong horn section. But this collaboration was short lived as well. Their last performance together, they appeared at Madison Square Garden In December of 1969. She would release only one album with Kosmic Blues; I Got Dem Ol' Kosmic Blues Again, Mama!

In 1970, still trying to fit right somewhere, Janis would form her last band, Full Tilt Boogie. This band was considered by Janis to be her band. Her "real" band, as she had had more input and control in it's formation than she did Kosmic Blues and after all, she was a replacement singer in "Big Brother."

" Listen Miss, I don't know who it is you're talking about, but not her money or her house or her career or her band is going to make one bit of difference when she's dead! "

Janis' dependence on heroin and alcohol had never waned. In fact both continued and increased. Those who knew Janis were frequently alarmed by the severity of her oft times sickly condition, but "interventions" weren't really what people did then. People just didn't intervene in anothers habits or drug use.

No matter how much success Janis gained, no matter how "big" she became, she still felt she was just that "ugly fat pig" from Port Arthur Texas. She felt as insignificant on the inside of her success as she had felt outside of it all those years ago.

She struggled with loneliness, depression, anxiety, self worth and a myriad of other emotional debilitation. Janis used heroin as her escape. Her confidence booster. Her confidant, comfort, and true friend.

Those who knew her say that many of her eccentricities and excesses were aimed at all those people who used to tell her how worthless she was. And her constant craving for attention caused her to behave recklessly, to alienate people, and to take enormous risk with her health.

All of the people who knew Janis knew that she had an extremely high intelligence. They also knew how fragile she really was, and that her lonely sense in the world was what truly controlled and drove her.

Her last performance with her band Full Tilt Boogie was at Harvard Stadium in Boston, August 1970. And it was the last performance of Janis' life. On Thursday October 1, Janis went to the beauty parlor and had her hair done. She also stopped by her lawyer's office for another matter, but coincidentally revised her will as well.

In September Janis and Full Tilt Boogie had begun working on the recording of their new album Pearl. On October 3, Janis had gone into the Sunset Sound Studio in Los Angeles to do some prep work for the song she would be recording the next day. But Janis never made it back to the studio.

Sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday October 4th, 1970 Janis Joplin died of an overdose of heroin. Alone in her Landmark Hotel room. As alone as she had felt for most of her life. Her time of death estimated to be around 1:40 a.m.

That she died this way, should have came as no surprise to those who knew her, those who had feared something just like this was coming. But the shock of her death reverberated throughout everyone who knew her and it echoed worldwide.

Janis Lyn Joplin, little girl so perpetually blue. Love starved, gutsy, whiskey voiced, a true pioneer, dead at twenty seven. At the height of a long awaited success. At the height of her life. "Oh Lord, how she could sing!"

According to Janis' wishes her body was cremated. Her ashes scattered by air over the coastline of Marin County, California.

In just the span of two weeks in the Autumn of 1970, the world was rocked and left reeling from the loss of two musical supernovas; Jimi Hendrix dead at twenty seven on September 18th. Shortly thereafter, just two short weeks later, Janis Joplin. It was a sad and sobering time. It was a questioning, both personally and musically.

Janis' career was short, but it was bursting with fire, passion, sorrow and possibility.

Janis was loud and bawdy, gutsy and blunt. She gave women permission to be just that and be women too. To take their place in the seat, on the stage, in the forefront. She paved a certain way. She is owed respect and she is owed gratitude. But what she is owed most of all, is for her songs to be played. For new generations of women to listen, aspire, and become who people may say they will never become.

There was only one Janis Joplin. And she won't be remembered the way they remembered her in Port Arthur, but as a true beauty. An American gem. We remember you Janis. And we still love you baby.

Big Brother and the Holding Company:

1967
Big Brother & the Holding Company 
Mainstream

1968
Cheap Thrills 
Columbia

Kozmic Blues Band :
 
1969
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! 
Columbia 

Full Tilt Boogie :

1971 (Posthumous)
Pearl
Columbia

Posthumous Releases:

Big Brother & the Holding Company / Full Tilt Boogie

1972
In Concert 
Legacy

1973
Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits 
Columbia 

1975
Janis
CBS

1980
Anthology

1983 
Farewell Song 
Columbia 

1984
Cheaper Thrills 
Fan Club 

1993
Janis 
Columbia Legacy

1995
18 Essential Songs 
Columbia Legacy

1995
The Collection 

1998
Live at Winterland '68
Columbia Legacy
 
1999
Live at Woodstock: August 19, 1969
 
1999
Box of Pearls 
Sony Legacy

2000
Super Hits
Sony
 
2001
Love, Janis 
Sony

2003
Essential Janis Joplin 
Sony 

2007
Very Best of Janis Joplin 
(Import)

_{Selected quotations taken from: Friedman, Myra. (1992). Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin.
NY: Harmony Books. ISBN 0-517-58650-9.}