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Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin, San Jose, California, 1968
Background information
Birth name	Janis Lyn Joplin
Born	January 19, 1943(1943-01-19) Port Arthur, Texas, U.S.
Died	October 4, 1970 (aged 27) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Genre(s)	Psychedelic rock, acid rock, blues-rock, hard rock
Occupation(s)	Singer, songwriter, arranger
Instrument(s)	Vocals, guitar, maracas
Years active	1963 - 1970
Label(s)	Columbia
Associated acts	Big Brother & the Holding Company
Website	http://www.officialjanis.com/

Janis Lyn Joplin (19 January 1943 – 4 October 1970) was an American singer, songwriter, and music arranger, from Port Arthur, Texas. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and eventually a solo career. She is widely considered one of the greatest artists of the 1960s and 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] Her career continued until her death in Los Angeles, California of a drug overdose at the age of 27.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 University 2 Career 2.1 Early efforts 2.2 Big Brother and The Holding Company 2.3 Solo career 2.4 Contemporary concerns 2.5 Pearl 3 Death 4 Legacy 5 In popular culture 6 Discography 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 Samples 11 External links

Janis Joplin was born to Seth and Dorothy (East) Joplin^[2]; her father was an engineer at Texaco, and her mother the registrar at a business college. She 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.^{[citation needed]} 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 stated that she was mostly shunned.^{[citation needed]} Primarily a painter while still in school, she first began singing blues and folk music with friends.

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," located at 2812 1/2 Nueces Street. The campus newspaper ran a profile of her in 1962 headlined "She Dares To Be Different".^{[citation needed]}

Cultivating a rebellious manner, 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, living in North Beach and later Haight-Ashbury. In Haight-Ashbury, Joplin lived in the same building as the chess master Jude Acers. On June 25, 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitar player Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, further accompanied by Margareta Kaukonen on typewriter (as percussion instrument). These sessions, recorded in non-stereo sound on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk," "Trouble In Mind," "Kansas City Blues," "Hesitation Blues," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out," "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" and "Long Black Train Blues," and were later released as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape.^{[citation needed]} More early recordings are found on the album collection Janis, including the tracks "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", "Mary Jane" and "No Reason For Livin'".

Around this time her drug use began to increase, and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user.^{[citation needed]} She also used other intoxicants. She was a heavy drinker throughout her career, and her trademark beverage was Southern Comfort.

In April 1965, several months after Joplin recorded the tracks with Kaukonen, her friends, noticing the physical effects of her amphetamine habit (she weighed 88 pounds (39,9 kilograms)), convinced her to return to her parents in Port Arthur, Texas.^{[citation needed]} Living at home, she changed her entire lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, began wearing relatively modest dresses, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as a sociology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Nevertheless, she still corresponded by mail with a methamphetamine dealer she had known in San Francisco and even considered his proposal of marriage.^{[citation needed]} Shortly after the man visited the Joplin household wearing a conservative suit and tie, charming the entire family and asking Mr. Joplin for permission to marry his daughter, the man broke off contact with her. During her year at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to perform solo, accompanying herself on guitar. One of her performances was reviewed in the Austin American-Statesman.

In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the psychedelic band Big Brother and The Holding Company, a band that was gaining some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who had known her in Texas and who at the time was managing Big Brother. Helms' promotion company, Family Dog Productions, was becoming a major force in the San Francisco scene rivaling Bill Graham. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966.^[3] Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco on June 10.

On August 23, 1966^[3] the group signed a deal with independent label Mainstream Records. They recorded an album in the fall, but due to the lack of success of their early singles, the album was not released until August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Big Brother set at Monterey included a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain." Joplin's performance at Monterey, like that of Jimi Hendrix, made her an international star virtually overnight. (The D.A. Pennebaker documentary Monterey Pop captured Cass Elliot in the crowd silently mouthing "Wow, that's really heavy" during Joplin's performance.)^{[citation needed]}

In November 1967, the group parted ways with Helms and signed with top artist manager Albert Grossman, who had become famous in his own right as the manager of Bob Dylan. Up to this point, Big Brother had performed only in California (mostly in San Francisco) but they had gained national prominence with their Monterey performance. On February 16, 1968,^[4] the group began its first East Coast tour in Philadelphia, and the following day they gave their first performance in New York City at the Anderson Theater. On April 7, 1968, the last day of their East Coast tour, Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the "Wake for Martin Luther King, Jr." concert in New York.

During the spring of 1968, Joplin and Big Brother performed on a short-lived variety show hosted by Dick Cavett. Although the video and audio of that particular broadcast are gone, she made three subsequent appearances on Cavett programs, all of them preserved on color videotape and later DVD. (A preserved black & white videotape of Big Brother performing and talking about the constant arrival of hippies in the Haight Ashbury in April of 1967 was broadcast only in San Francisco at that time.)

Big Brother's second album, Cheap Thrills, featuring cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb, was recorded in New York and Los Angeles between April and June 1968 and released in August. Combining concert performances and studio recordings, it had a raw quality, including the sound of a cocktail glass breaking and the broken shards getting swept away during the song "Turtle Blues." Together with the documentary film Monterey Pop, released to repertory movie theaters in early 1969, the album made Joplin into one of the leading musical stars of the late Sixties.^{[citation needed]} Cheap Thrills, which also gave the band a breakthrough hit single, "Piece of My Heart," debuted at the number one spot and stayed there for weeks, selling over one million copies in its first month of release alone.^{[citation needed]} Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, showed Janis and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through a selection of tracks from their albums.

The group made another East Coast tour during July-August 1968, which included performances at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. After returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1, Joplin announced that she would be leaving Big Brother. The group continued touring through the fall and Joplin gave her last official performance with Big Brother at a Family Dog benefit on December 1, 1968.^{[citation needed]}

After splitting from Big Brother, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band. Modeled on the classic soul revue bands, the group backed her on the I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! album in 1969. Their first public performance was at the Stax-Volt Christmas Show in Memphis, Tennessee on December 21, 1968, with The Bar-Kays, Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Albert King, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, William Bell and Eddie Floyd.^{[citation needed]}

Reviews of the new group were mixed. Some music critics, including Ralph Gleason, felt that the band's horn section competed with her voice^{[citation needed]} -- criticisms that infuriated Joplin, who was under a lot of pressure as the first female in a hard rock band to leave the band and then get solo billing.^{[citation needed]} Other reviewers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post generally ignored the flaws and devoted entire articles to celebrating the singer's magic.^[5]

Joplin toured successfully with the band across North America and Europe throughout 1969, including a Saturday night performance at the legendary Woodstock Festival in August. The Kozmic Blues album, released in September of 1969, was certified gold later that year but did not match the success of Cheap Thrills.^{[citation needed]} At the end of the year, the group broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was at Madison Square Garden in New York City on December 21, 1969.^{[citation needed]}

The documentary film Woodstock omitted her entire performance. These omissions of her singing at the festival, along with comments from Joplin publicist Myra Friedman (present at the event) and from the post-production crew of the movie, suggest strongly that Joplin was not at her best that weekend.^{[citation needed]} At least one audience member, however, remembered her performance fondly twenty years later.^[6] The 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes just one of her selections from the concert: Work Me, Lord. The segment begins with Joplin asking the audience, "How you doin'?" and then advising people who are stoned to "drink lots of water." She then plunges into the song. Gabriel Mekler, who produced the album, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman (after Joplin's death) that the singer had lived in his house during the recording sessions at his insistence so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-using friends (who included Peggy Caserta).^{[citation needed]}

By the time Joplin reached Woodstock, her drug use returned, Decades later, Caserta and Myra Friedman recalled how disappointed she was in her performance and the amount of heroin she used.^{[citation needed]} In addition to her stage fright at Woodstock,^{[citation needed]} she had trouble at Madison Square Garden where, as she told rock journalist David Dalton, the audience watched and listened to "every note [she sang] with 'Is she gonna make it?' in their eyes."^[7] She told Friedman and others in the music business that she was a lot more nervous and prone to drinking and drugging in recording studios and playing large venues than at the Fillmore West and other small clubs.^{[citation needed]} Her behavior while making the album that would follow Kozmic Blues turned out to be tragic proof that she felt that way, and Mekler would not be there for her.^{[citation needed]} A writer for Playboy magazine noticed during the Kozmic Blues sessions that Joplin made her own amateur recordings of each day's takes with a Sony cassette recorder and, after leaving the studio at night, played them repeatedly searching for mistakes. Waiters ejected her and the writer from restaurants.^[8]

In February 1970, Joplin got clean and sober in Brazil. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites, who had designed the singer's stage costumes from 1966 to 1969. Joplin was romanced by an American schoolteacher named David Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. They were photographed together in a crowd at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.^{[citation needed]} Returning to the United States, the singer then formed the Full Tilt Boogie Band. Composed mostly of drug-free Canadian musicians who didn't associate with her friends from Big Brother,^{[citation needed]} the band included an organ but no horn section. Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on April 4, 1970.^[9] Recordings from this concert were included in an in-concert album released posthumously in 1972.

In late June 1970, Joplin and her new band joined the all-star Festival Express tour through Canada, performing alongside The Band, The Grateful Dead and others. However, the financial and other problems that led to the tour being cut short also resulted in most of the concert footage remaining unseen until more than thirty years after Joplin's death. Footage of her performing the song "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the 1980s. The audio portion of same was included on the 1982 Farewell Song album.^{[citation needed]} The audio of other Festival Express performances were included on that 1972 Joplin "in concert" album. But the visual element stayed in a vault until the 21st century release of the Festival Express DVD.

In the "Tell Mama" video shown on MTV in the 1980s, Joplin wore feathers in her hair and a loose-fitting costume, all of which had a vaguely psychedelic color pattern. This was her new standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970, captured in all the color footage from the Festival Express and on the color videotape used by The Dick Cavett Show. Members of her band and her entourage called her "Pearl" at her request to describe her new public image, but she did not want the media to report the nickname.^{[citation needed]} During the last week of Joplin's life, Circus contained a color photo of the motley feathers in her hair. The new costumes came after her designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in the May 1968 issue of Vogue), resigned shortly after their return from Brazil.^{[citation needed]}

Despite Janis Joplin's substance abuse, she disputed several practices that were common at rock concerts. A 1970 interview for Newsweek reflected her opinion on gate-crashers at concerts:

"I don't believe in gate-crashing,"Janis Joplin said last week. "The people aren't up there when I'm sweating on a stage at a festival, breaking my ass. You can get the money, man. Sell your old lady, sell your dope. Look at me, man, I'm selling my heart."^[10]

While Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead shared her rejection of gate-crashing (as evident in Festival Express), Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner by contrast did not, as reflected in the same Newsweek piece: "I would enthusiastically urge anyone attending a rock festival to break in. They should be free," he said.^[10]

Joplin objected to the practice of dosing people with LSD without their permission or knowledge. On August 4, 1970, while at New York's El Quijote bar with her publicist Myra Friedman and a fan, she commented that people who did that were comparable to police officers who go around smashing people's skulls.^[11] Joplin expounded on the topic a few days later. Over dinner with Friedman and "several members of Full-Tilt (Boogie Band)" in a New York restaurant called Bradley's, Joplin spoke about "what she called 'hippie brainwashing'. 'They're frauds, the whole goddamn culture. They bitch about brainwashing from their parents and they do the same damn thing. I've never known a one of those people who would tolerate any way of life but their own.'"^[11]

Joplin's substance abuse sometimes affected her concert performances, but she never missed a gig or arrived late. She told many people that she believed in the American work ethic,^[12] once castigating Rolling Stone journalist David Dalton because he neglected to tape record or even listen to a conversation she was having with singer Bonnie Bramlett on the Festival Express.^[12]

During September 1970, Joplin and her band began recording a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, who was famous for his work with The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was still enough usable material to compile an LP. "Mercedes Benz" was included despite it being a first take, and the track "Buried Alive In The Blues" — to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead — was kept as an instrumental.

The result was the posthumously released Pearl (1971). It became the biggest selling album of her career^{[citation needed]} and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" (which she learned from Arlo Guthrie),^{[citation needed]} as well as the social commentary of the a cappella "Mercedes Benz", written by Joplin, close friend and song writer Bob Neuwirth and beat poet Michael McClure. In 2003, Pearl was ranked #122 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Among her last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show on June 25 and August 3, 1970. On the June 25 show, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion, although she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state, man."^{[citation needed]} She made it there on August 14, accompanied by fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth and road manager John Cooke, but it would be one of the last decisions of her life and it reportedly proved to be a rather unhappy experience for her.^[13]

During the August 3rd Cavett broadcast, Joplin referred to her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York on August 6, 1970. The date was selected because it was the 25th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The anti-war concert was a day-long event featuring many of the top acts of the day including Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Paul Simon, The James Gang, and a dozen others.

Joplin's last public performance, given with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, took place on August 12, 1970 at the Harvard Stadium in Boston, Massachusetts. A glowing review appeared on the front page of the Harvard Crimson newspaper despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie performed with makeshift sound amplifiers after their regular equipment was stolen in Boston.^{[citation needed]}

The last recordings Joplin completed were "Mercedes Benz" and a birthday greeting for John Lennon on October 1, 1970, Happy Trails composed by Dale Evans. Lennon, whose birthday was October 9, later told Dick Cavett that her taped greeting arrived at his home after her death.^{[citation needed]} On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited the Sunset Sound Studios^[14] in Los Angeles to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites' song "Buried Alive In The Blues" so she could lay down vocals the next day.^[12] When she failed to show up at the studio by Sunday afternoon, producer Paul Rothchild became concerned. Full Tilt Boogie's road manager John Cooke drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel (since renamed the Highland Gardens Hotel) where Joplin had been a guest since August 24.^[15] He saw Joplin's psychedelically painted Porsche still in the parking lot. Upon entering her room, he found her dead on the floor. The official cause of death was an overdose of heroin possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.

Joplin was cremated in the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean and along Stinson Beach. The only funeral service was held at Pierce Brothers and attended by Joplin's parents and maternal aunt.^[16]

Joplin is now remembered for her powerful and distinctive voice — her rasping, overtone-rich sound diverged significantly from the soft folk and jazz-influenced styles that were common among many artists at the time. She personified that period of the Sixties when the San Francisco sound, along with (then considered) outlandish dress and lifestyles, jolted the rest of the country via magazines and television. Many Joplin fans remember her appearances on The Dick Cavett Show.

Joplin's contributions to the rock idiom were long overlooked, but her importance is now becoming more widely appreciated, thanks in part to the recent release of the long-unreleased documentary film, Festival Express.^{[citation needed]} Joplin's vocal style, her flamboyant dress, her outspokenness and sense of humour, her liberated stance (politically and sexually) and her hard-living image all combined to create an entirely new kind of female persona in rock and challenged prescriptive gender stereotypes.^{[citation needed]}

Joplin followed the precedent set by her white male counterparts in adopting the image, repertoire and performance style of black blues and rhythm & blues artists, both male and female.^{[citation needed]} Alongside Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, she also pioneered an entirely new range of expression for white women in the previously male-dominated world of post-Beatles rock.^{[citation needed]}

Her body decoration, with a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast, by the San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, is taken as a seminal moment in the tattoo revolution and was an early moment in the popular culture's acceptance of tattoos as art.^[17] Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, often including colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers.

The 1979 film The Rose was allegedly based on Joplin's life. Bette Midler earned an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her performance. In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created with input from Janis' younger sister Laura and Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway.^{[citation needed]} Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim and packed houses and was held over several times, the demanding role of the singing Janis attracting rock vocalists from relative unknowns to pop stars Laura Branigan and Beth Hart.^{[citation needed]} A national tour followed. Gospel According to Janis, a biographical film starring Zooey Deschanel as Joplin was scheduled to begin shooting in early 2007 but was postponed indefinitely.^{[citation needed]}

Not recognized by her hometown during her life, she was remembered much later. In 1988, her life and achievements were showcased and recognized in Port Arthur, Texas by the dedication of the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original bronze, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark.

Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

• The last verse of Don McLean's 1971 folk-rock song "American Pie" is believed to be referring to Joplin, when it says: "I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news. She just smiled and turned away..."^{[citation needed]}
• The Mamas & the Papas wrote a song about Janis Joplin entitled "Pearl", and released it as part of their 1971 album, People Like Us.
• Joplin's premature death is the subject of Dory Previn's song "A Stone for Bessie Smith", which appears on Previn's 1971 album Mythical Kings and Iguanas. The lyric sheet of this record refers to a televised conversation between Joplin and actress Gloria Swanson.
• According to the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who, she (Joplin) gave him his brown Mac. This was revealed in the episode "Gridlock".
• Janis Joplin is a central character in Michael Swanwick's 1981 Nebula nominated novelette Feast of Saint Janis, where one of her performances is central to a dystopic United States of America.
• "Birdsong" by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, which appeared on Garcia's eponymous 1972 studio album, was written about Janis Joplin.
• In the 2007 movie Across the Universe, Joplin is portrayed as Sadie, played by Dana Fuchs.
• "In the Quiet Morning" by Joan Baez recounts the moment the folk singer heard the news about Joplin's death.

Janis Joplin & Jorma Kaukonen

Title	Release date	Label	Notes
The Typewriter Tape	1964		bootleg recording

Big Brother and the Holding Company

Title	Release date	Label	Notes
Big Brother & the Holding Company	1967	Mainstream Records
Big Brother & the Holding Company	1967?	Columbia	Contains 2 extra single tracks
Big Brother & the Holding Company	1967, CD 1999	Columbia Legacy CK66425	Contains 2 extra single tracks
Cheap Thrills	1968	Columbia	2x Platinum RIAA
Cheap Thrills	1968, CD 1999	Legacy CK65784	Contains 4 extra tracks
Live at Winterland '68	1998	Columbia Legacy	ASIN: B000007TSP

Kozmic Blues Band

Title	Release date	Label	Notes
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!	1969	Columbia	1x Platinum RIAA
I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!	1969, CD 1999	Legacy CK65785	Contains 3 extra tracks

Full Tilt Boogie

Title	Release date	Label	Notes
Pearl	1971	Columbia	posthumous, 4x Platinum RIAA
Pearl	1971, CD unknown date	Columbia CD64188
Pearl	1971, CD 1999	Legacy CK65786	Contains 4 extra tracks
Pearl	1971, 2CD 2005	Legacy COL 515134 2	CD1 - 6 other extra tracks CD2 - full selection from The Festival Express Tour, 3 venues

Big Brother & the Holding Company / Full Tilt Boogie

Title	Release date	Label	Notes
Joplin: In Concert	1972	Legacy CK65786	ASIN: B0000024Y7

Later collections

Title	Release date	Label	Notes
Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits	1973	Columbia	ASIN B00000K2W1, 7x Platinum
Janis	1975	CBS	2 discs, Gold RIAA
Anthology	1980		2 discs
Farewell Song	1983	Columbia Records	ASIN: B000W44S8E
Cheaper Thrills	1984	Fan Club	ASIN: B000LYA9X8
Janis	1993	Columbia Legacy	3 discs - ASIN: B00000286P
18 Essential Songs	1995	Columbia Legacy	ASIN: B000002B1A, Gold RIAA
The Collection	1995	3 Discs	ASIN: B000BM6ATW
Live at Woodstock: August 19, 1969	1999
Box of Pearls	1999	Sony Legacy	5 Discs - ASIN: B0009YNSK6
Super Hits	2000	Sony	ASIN: B00004T1E6
Love, Janis	2001	Sony	ASIN: B00005EBIN
Essential Janis Joplin	2003	Sony	ASIN: B00007MB6Y
Very Best of Janis Joplin	2007	Import	ASIN: B000026A35

• Music of Austin
• List of number-one hits (United States)
• List of artists who reached number one on the Hot 100 (U.S.)

• Amburn, Ellis. Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin: A Biography. NY: Warner Books, 1992. ISBN 0-446-39506-4.
• Caserta, Peggy. Going Down with Janis: Janis Joplin's Intimate Story. Dell: 1974. ASIN: B000NSBNMI.
• Dalton, David. Piece of my Heart: A Portrait of Janis Joplin. NY: Da Capo Press, 1991. ISBN 0-306-80446-8.
• Echols, Alice. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. NY: Henry Holt, 1999. ISBN 0-8050-5394-8.
• Friedman, Myra. (1992). Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin. NY: Harmony Books. ISBN 0-517-58650-9.
• Joplin, Laura. Love, Janis. NY: Villard Books, 1992. ISBN 1-888358-08-4.
• Stieven-Taylor, Alison. Rock Chicks. Sydney: Rockpool Publishing, 2007. ISBN 9781921295065.

• Website by the Joplin estate
• Janis Joplin's Kozmic Blues - janisjoplin.net
• Canadian Classic Rock Page: The Full Tilt Boogie Band
• Janis Joplin at Find-A-Grave
• Janis Joplin biography at Fyne Times
• Biography at The Handbook of Texas Online
• JohnGilmore.com: Spotlight on Janis Joplin
• Janis Joplin Yahoo-Music Website (incl. biography by Richie Unterberger)
• Janis Joplin – Museum of the Gulf Coast, Port Arthur, Texas
• In Memoriam Janis Joplin (German)
• Janis Joplin en Español (Spanish)
• Janis Joplin's various musicians and bands
• Janis Joplin: a list of unofficial recordings and tracks
• VH1 Biography page
• Janis Joplin at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival Twelve photographs of Janis Joplin in performance by Bruce Jackson.
• Big Brother and the Holding Company: Nine Hundred Nights (documentary excerpt)