Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, where she grew up feeling like an outsider and found refuge in the blues records of Bessie Smith and Lead Belly. After singing in Texas coffeehouses, she moved to San Francisco and in 1966 joined the psychedelic band Big Brother and the Holding Company, whose live shows quickly became legendary in the city's flowering music scene.

Her ferocious performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival made her a national sensation, and the 1968 album Cheap Thrills, featuring her searing version of Piece of My Heart, topped the American charts. Striking out on her own, she formed the Kozmic Blues Band and later the Full Tilt Boogie Band, performed at Woodstock, and sang with a vulnerability and power that no contemporary could match.

Joplin died in Los Angeles in October 1970, at the age of 27, of an accidental drug overdose, just days after completing her finest recordings. The posthumous album Pearl reached number one, and Me and Bobby McGee became her only chart-topping single. She opened the door for generations of women in rock, and her voice, wounded, joyous, and utterly fearless, remains one of music's most unforgettable sounds.