Janis Joplin
Blues legend Janis Lyn Joplin was born on January 19th 1943, the eldest child of parents Seth and Dorothy Joplin. Janis was born and raised in the small Southern petroleum industry town of Port Arthur, Texas. Her father was a canning factory worker, her mother a registrar at a local business college. Her non-abberational upbringing coupled with the atmosphere of Port Arthur at the time; generally restrictive, intolerant, and unnurturing must've made even Janis' early childhood difficult. By all accounts, however, Janis seems to have been a "normal" and happy child, who fitted society's usual definition of "pretty". It was in Janis' adolescence that the hang-ups and hassles that were to affect the path of the rest of her life. In a sense, her rigid upbringing played a large part in making Janis who she was. This would never have been admitted at the time, but, predictably, the "Port Arthur" ethic created a fire inside Janis (the fire which later made her so famous) and kept it burning until her death. Janis' troubles began, when, as a teenager, her "good looks" gradually began to disintegrate, her soft blonde hair turned into an unruly brown mane. She also developed severe acne, which would scar her mentally as well as physical
" She soon began avoiding mirrors, and her anxiety about her looks was made worse by the constant taunts by peers, who rejected her and often made fun of her. The last person to speak to Janis before her death was quite probably the man off whom she purchased a packet of cigarettes. By the time Janis graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960, she had already decided she wanted to be a singer, and left home. The band played at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, and, famously, at the Monterey Pop Festival, California, where Janis gave a legendary performance. Hence, Janis became something of a loner, an "ugly duckling"- somebody who no longer fitted society's absurd notion of "pretty. It was her powerful vocals on the extracted tracks "Summertime" and "Piece Of My Heart" that propelled the album to the top end of the charts. Concert flyers read: "Big Brother and The Holding Company with Janis Joplin. Then, ironically, a fed-up Janis headed back to Austin, where she had previously experienced such hostility, and stayed there for a further seven months before she was on the move again this time to San Francisco, where the next, and most important, chapter of her life was to begin. In the summer of 1965, Janis returned home to Port Authur for a year to question her life direction. In 1970, while recording her first album with the Full Tilt Boogie Band (entitled "Pearl" after a nickname given to her by her closest friends), Janis chanced into using heroin once again. As a result of the album, the group was now playing even larger audiences for bigger fees. Janis raised on classical music and omnipresent country music back in Texas, discovered the blues of Louisiana. However, as the pressure on the hippie rockers began mounting, and they began using stronger, more expensive drugs, the relentless hedonism began to affect their working relationship.
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