walking upstream…
Janis Joplin
sourcesKQED — Jorma Kaukonen on Janis Joplin and Recording the 1964 'Typewriter Tape' · The New York Times, Aug. 9 1970 — Bessie Smith Grave, Unmarked Since '37, Finally Gets a Stone · Oxford American — Cynthia Shearer, The Thinning of Big Mama (the Both/And Club, Thornton's blessing and royalties) · Deep Roots Magazine — Jorma, Janis & The Typewriter Tape
Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, a Gulf Coast refinery town, in a comfortable house with a mother who encouraged piano and a father who liked ideas — and she still spent high school as the local oddity, too far left and too strange for a segregated town with no use for either. She was a painter first. The singing arrived almost by accident around 1962, at a party, doing an imitation of an Odetta record, when a voice came out of her that nobody in the room had heard before. A few years of Austin hootenannies, San Francisco coffeehouses and a near-fatal methedrine habit later, Chet Helms put her in front of Big Brother and the Holding Company. Monterey made her famous in a single song. She died in a Hollywood motel in October 1970, twenty-seven years old, with Pearl unfinished.
the sound in question
1968
Piece of My HeartJanis Joplin
walk the tributaries ↓
Bessie Smith1920s · Blues / Classic female blues / Vaudeville
Joplin bought her first Bessie Smith records in Port Arthur, and later put the debt plainly: Smith "showed me the air and taught me how to fill it. She's the reason I started singing, really" — a line that reaches us through Myra Friedman's and Alice Echols's biographies rather than any surviving tape. Jorma Kaukonen, who played guitar behind her in 1964, remembers that stretch as "that Bessie Smith, bluesy Janis — and to be honest with you, that's my favorite Janis." In August 1970, two months before her own death, Joplin split the cost of a headstone for Smith's grave, unmarked since 1937.
listen: upstream & heresource: uDiscover Music — Piece Of Her Heart ↗
1929
Nobody Knows You When You're Down and OutBessie Smith
1964
Nobody Knows You When You're Down and OutJanis Joplin
listen forSmith recorded "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" in 1929 and made a Jimmie Cox song permanent: measured, almost stately, every line landing square on the beat while the horns answer her. Thirty-five years later a twenty-one-year-old Joplin sang it into a tape recorder at Kaukonen's house — his wife Margareta typing throughout, which is how the tape got its name — with no band, no audience, and no reason to be doing it beyond loving the record. It surfaced officially only in 2022.
Big Mama Thornton1950s–60s · Blues / Rhythm and blues
Thornton wrote "Ball and Chain" and was singing it at the Both/And Club on Divisadero Street when Joplin heard it. Big Brother asked permission to record it; Thornton granted it. Their version — Monterey in 1967, then Cheap Thrills — made Joplin famous and made the song hers in the public mind, which Joplin worked against: she introduced Thornton from the stage as its writer, and Thornton eventually received songwriting credit and royalties. Thornton's own verdict on the cover, as Alice Echols records it: "That girl feels like I do." Arhoolie issued Thornton's recording in 1968 to catch the wave of Joplin's.
listen: upstream & heresource: Yale University Library — Big Mama Thornton, Part 3 ↗
1968
Ball and ChainBig Mama Thornton
1968
Ball and ChainJanis Joplin
listen forThornton takes it slow and conversational, a woman talking herself through the trouble with the band hanging well back. Big Brother rebuilt it as a minor-key climb — the guitar coiling underneath while Joplin starts nearly quiet and ends four minutes later tearing at the top of her range. Mind the chronology: she learned this song live, before either recording existed, so the version she actually took it from is one nobody can play back. What's on the Arhoolie side is Thornton catching up to her own song.
Odetta1950s–60s · Folk / Blues / Spirituals
This is where the voice came from, by Joplin's own account. From a 1969 Hit Parader interview: "I bought Bessie Smith and Odetta records, and one night, I was at this party and I did an imitation of Odetta. I'd never sung before, and I came out with this huge voice." Her sister Laura tells the same story independently — that Janis discovered "she had the ability to sing Odetta and sound like Odetta," and that finding that power inside herself overwhelmed her. Before that party she was a painter who read Beat poetry. After it she was a singer.
listen: upstream & heresource: KQED — Growing Up with Sister Janis ↗
1956
Muleskinner BluesOdetta
1964
Kansas City BluesJanis Joplin
listen forNo source records which Odetta song she imitated that night, so this pairing illustrates the manner rather than documenting the moment. What is audible is the shared equipment. Odetta's "Muleskinner Blues" is a folk-blues sung at full lung with a guitar and nothing else behind it — one person filling a room by force. Joplin's "Kansas City Blues," from the same 1964 tapes, is a twenty-one-year-old working in exactly that mode: big, close to unaccompanied, far more Odetta than anything Big Brother would later build around her.