Janis Lyn Joplin was born January 19, 1943 and died October 4, 1970. She was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas (a small Southern petroleum industry town). She gravitated to artistic interests cultivated by parents Seth and Dorothy Joplin.
             Discovering an inborn talent to belt the blues, Janis began copying the styles of Bessie Smith, Odetta and Leadbelly. She played the coffee houses and 'hootenannies' of the day in the small towns of Texas. She later ventured to the beatnik haunts of Venice, North Beach and the Village in New York, eventually landing in Austin, Texas as a student at the University of Texas. Jumping into the on-the-edge lifestyle cultivated by the beats, Janis thrilled at her creativity, but almost lost herself in experiments with drugs and alcohol, especially the highly dangerous drug...'speed'. She eventually came home for a year to question the direction of her life. She attended college, but wasn't content. She returned to Texas in 1966 to sing in a country-and-western band, but returned to San Francisco that same year to join a blues band called "Big Brother and the Holding Company."
             In 1967 the group appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, one of the earliest large-scale rock festivals, and Joplin became an overnight star. With the ever-increasing enthusiasm for their unique brand of psychedelic rock, the group was sought out after by Albert Grossman (manager of American folk singer Bob Dylan). Grossman became the manager of the group and signed them with Columbia Records. In 1968 Columbia released the album Cheap Thrills, which topped Billboard magazine's popular music charts for 8 weeks, yielding the hit single "Piece of My Heart." The album, which includes such songs as "Ball and Chain" and "Turtle Blues," became one of the most well known recordings in rock history.
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