Janis Joplin

Early life

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on (1943-01-19)January 19, 1943, to Dorothy Bonita East (1913–1998), a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910–1987), an engineer at Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. The family attended First Christian Church of Port Arthur, a congregation belonging to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination.

Her parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children. As a teenager, Joplin befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by blues artists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, which Joplin later credited with influencing her decision to become a singer. She began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School. In high school, she was a classmate of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson. Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school. As a teen, she became overweight and suffered from acne, leaving her with deep scars that required dermabrasion.

Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin (UT), although she did not complete her college studies. The campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27, 1962, headlined "She Dares to Be Different." The article began, "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin." While at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys (Powell St. John and Lanny Wiggins), showcasing her strong mezzo-soprano vocals, and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger. According to Freak Brothers cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, who befriended her, she used to sell copies of The Texas Ranger, which contained some of Shelton's early comic books, on the campus.

Career

1962–1965: Early recordings

Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets. Her first song, "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas student. She left Texas in January 1963, "Just to get away," she said, "because my head was in a much different place", hitchhiking with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco. Still in San Francisco in 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, which incidentally featured Kaukonen's wife Margareta using a typewriter in the background. This session 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 was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape.

In 1963, Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the two years that followed, her drug use increased and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort. In May 1965, Joplin's friends in San Francisco, noticing the detrimental effects on her from regularly injecting methamphetamine—she was described as "skeletal" and "emaciated"— persuaded her to return to Port Arthur. During that month, her friends threw her a bus-fare party so she could return to her parents in Texas. Five years later, Joplin told Rolling Stone magazine writer David Dalton the following about her first stint in San Francisco: "I didn't have many friends and I didn't like the ones I had."

Back in Port Arthur in the spring of 1965, after Joplin's parents noticed her weight of 88 pounds (40 kg), she changed her lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Her sister Laura said in a 2016 interview that social work was her major during her year at Lamar. During her time at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. One of her performances was at a benefit by local musicians for Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who was suffering with ill health. Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc in the fall of 1965. She had begun a relationship with him toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco. Now living in New York where he worked with IBM computers, he visited her to ask her father for her hand in marriage. Joplin and her mother began planning the wedding. De Blanc, who traveled frequently, ended the engagement soon afterward.

1966–1969: Big Brother and the Holding Company

In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco. At that time, she gave her parents the impression Austin was her final destination and it was the location of the rock band she was joining. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Soon after that, her parents received a letter from her, and that was how they learned she was in San Francisco, not Austin.

In June 1966, Joplin was still strict about drug use and when she shared an apartment with Travis Rivers upon their arrival in San Francisco, she made him promise that using needles would not be allowed there. When bandmate Dave Getz accompanied her from a rehearsal to her home, Rivers was not there, but "two or three", according to Getz' recollection 25 years later, guests whom Rivers had invited were in the process of injecting drugs. "One of them was about to tie off," recalled Getz. "Janis went nuts! I had never seen anybody explode like that. She was screaming and crying and Travis walked in. She screamed at him: 'We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head and I tried to calm her down. I said, 'They're just doing mescaline,' because that's what I thought it was. She said, 'You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!'"

A San Francisco concert from that summer (1966) was recorded and released on the 1984 album Cheaper Thrills. Joplin had a short relationship and longer friendship with Grateful Dead founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them. In the unfortunate circumstances the band signed with Bob Shad's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the label took place in Chicago in September, but these were not satisfactory, and the band returned to San Francisco, continuing to perform live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. The band recorded two tracks, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness" in Los Angeles, and these were released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. After playing at a happening in Stanford in early December 1966, the band traveled back to Los Angeles to record ten tracks between December 12 and 14, 1966, produced by Bob Shad, which appeared on the band's debut album in August 1967. In late 1966, Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen. Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple. In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish. The pair lived together as a couple for a few months in her Lyon Street apartment. A driver's license, issued to Joplin in 1967, shows her residence as 122 Lyon Street No. 3, in San Francisco. Joplin and Big Brother played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.

Kozmic Blues and Woodstock (1969–1970)

After splitting from Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band, composed of session musicians such as keyboardist Stephen Ryder and saxophonist Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers, as well as former Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist Sam Andrew and future Full Tilt Boogie Band bassist Brad Campbell. The band was influenced by the Stax-Volt rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul bands of the 1960s, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays. By early 1969, Joplin was allegedly shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day (equivalent to $1,756 in 2025) although efforts were made to keep her clean during the recording of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Gabriel Mekler, who produced the album, kept her away from drugs and her drug-using friends during the record's production. Joplin's appearances with the Kozmic Blues Band in Europe were released in theaters, in multiple documentaries. Janis, which was reviewed by The Washington Post on March 21, 1975, shows Joplin arriving in Frankfurt by plane. The film Janis includes interviews with Joplin in Stockholm and from her visit to London for her gig at Royal Albert Hall. John Byrne Cooke, road manager for Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, wrote a book about her ongoing use of narcotics, particularly when she was outside the United States. On the episode of The Dick Cavett Show that was telecast in the United States on the night of July 18, 1969, Joplin and her band performed "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" as well as "To Love Somebody".

Joplin performed at Woodstock starting at approximately 2:00 a.m., on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Joplin had informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig. Joplin was flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother to the festival site. During the helicopter ride, she saw the enormous crowd and instantly became extremely nervous and giddy, as Baez recalled. Initially, Joplin was eager to get on the stage and perform, but was repeatedly delayed as bands were contractually obliged to perform ahead of Joplin. Faced with a ten-hour wait after arriving at the backstage area, Joplin spent some of that time shooting heroin and drinking alcohol with her friend and sometimes lover Peggy Caserta in a tent. Joplin pulled through, and engaged frequently with the crowd, asking them if they had everything they needed and if they were staying stoned. The audience cheered for an encore, to which Joplin replied and sang "Ball and Chain". Pete Townshend, who performed with the Who later in the same morning after Joplin finished, witnessed her performance and said in his 2012 memoir, "She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn't at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she'd consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible." Janis remained at Woodstock for the remainder of the festival. Starting at approximately 3:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, Joplin was among many Woodstock performers who stood in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash during their performance. This information was published by David Crosby in 1988. Later in the morning of August 18, Joplin and Joan Baez sat in Joe Cocker's van and witnessed Hendrix's close-of-show performance, according to Baez's memoir And a Voice to Sing With (1989).

Pearl (June–October 1970)

During Joplin's June 1970 concert tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she told Rolling Stone magazine journalist David Dalton and others that four years earlier, Travis Rivers had seduced her and slept with her so she would feel obligated to join Big Brother, and the story was false, according to many Joplin biographers including Myra Friedman.

Joplin's friends, including Friedman, had admired for years the honesty she displayed in conversations with them. She never seemed phony. In 1970, they became dismayed when they noticed she was starting to make up stories about herself to enhance a public image as a "zany" (Friedman's description) sex symbol who was constantly searching for a man to love her. Joplin's March 20 statement to Rolling Stone that she and David Niehaus were "going into the jungle" was not true. On June 25, Dick Cavett said to her on-camera, "When last I heard of you, you were in the jungles of Brazil, or maybe not the jungles."

From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour where a train transported musicians across Canada, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Footage of her performance of "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s.

David Dalton was part of Joplin's entourage throughout her June 1970 concerts in the United States and on board the Festival Express train. After her death, he made transcripts of numerous cassette tapes on which he had recorded her speaking. Dalton eventually lost all the recordings except for the Festival Express train conversation between Joplin and Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie. Dalton's last cassette expired moments after Joplin's over-the-top comment to Bramlett, "All my life I just wanted to be a beatnik – meet all the heavies, get stoned, get laid, have a good time... I knew I had a good voice and I could always get a couple of beers off of it. All of a sudden someone threw me in this rock'n'roll band. They threw these musicians at me, man, and the sound was coming from behind. The bass was charging me."

Among Joplin's last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show. In her June 25, 1970, appearance, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state". On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union. On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, a registered nurse who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith—was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. Joplin had frequently cited Bessie Smith as a musical influence. The lead paragraph of an Associated Press story said Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, Joplin and Green never met. Joplin was at home when she received a phone call from someone who explained the situation with Smith's gravesite, and she mailed a check to contribute to the new marker.

Death

On Sunday evening, October 4, 1970, Joplin was found dead on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel by her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke. Alcohol was present in the room. Newspapers reported that no other drugs or paraphernalia were present. According to a 1983 book authored by Joseph DiMona and Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, evidence of narcotics was removed from the scene by a friend of Joplin and later put back after the person realized that an autopsy was going to reveal that narcotics were in her system. The book adds that prior to Joplin's death, Noguchi had investigated other fatal drug overdoses in Los Angeles where friends believed they were doing favors for decedents by removing evidence of narcotics, but then "thought things over" and returned to put back the evidence. Noguchi performed an autopsy on Joplin and determined the cause of death to be a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol.

John Byrne Cooke believed Joplin had obtained heroin much more potent than what she and other L.A. heroin users had received on previous occasions, as was indicated by overdoses of several of her dealer's other customers during the same weekend. Her death was ruled accidental.

Both Peggy Caserta, Joplin's close friend, and Seth Morgan, Joplin's fiancé, failed to meet Joplin on October 2, the Friday immediately before her death; Joplin had been expecting both of them to keep her company that night. According to Caserta, Joplin was saddened that neither of her friends came to the Landmark as promised. During the 24 hours Joplin lived after this disappointment, Caserta did not call to explain why she failed to show up. Caserta admitted to waiting until late Saturday night to dial the Landmark Motel switchboard, only to learn that Joplin had instructed the desk clerk not to accept any incoming calls for her after midnight. Morgan did speak to Joplin via telephone within the 24 hours before her death, but little is known about that call. She used a phone at Sunset Sound Recorders where her colleagues ("there were perhaps twenty to twenty-five people present," wrote biographer Myra Friedman) noticed that whatever Morgan said to her made her very angry.

Peggy Caserta has insisted Joplin's death was not an accidental overdose, but rather a result of a head gash suffered after the "hourglass heel" of her slingback sandal caught in the shag carpet, causing her to lose her balance. Caserta did concede, however, that drugs and/or alcohol may have played a role in hastening Joplin's death that night. Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean.

Personal life

Joplin's significant relationships with men included ones with Peter de Blanc, Country Joe McDonald (who wrote the song "Janis" at Joplin's request), David (George) Niehaus, Kris Kristofferson, and Seth Morgan (from July 1970 until her death, at which time they were allegedly engaged). She also had relationships with women. During her first stint in San Francisco in 1963, Joplin met and briefly lived with Jae Whitaker, a woman whom she had met while playing pool at the bar Gino & Carlo in North Beach. Whitaker broke off their relationship because of Joplin's hard drug use and sexual relationships with other people. Whitaker was first identified by name in connection with Joplin in 1999, when Alice Echols' biography Scars of Sweet Paradise was published.

Joplin had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta. They first met in November 1966 when Big Brother performed at The Matrix in San Francisco. Caserta was one of 15 people in the audience; at the time, she ran Mnasidika, a clothing boutique in the Haight Ashbury. Approximately a month after the concert, Joplin visited Caserta's boutique and said she could not afford to buy a pair of $5 jeans for sale, asking to make a 50 cent down payment. Caserta was amazed such a talented singer could not afford $5, and gave Joplin a pair for free. Their friendship was platonic for more than a year. Before it became romantic, Caserta was in love with Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, and sometime during the first half of 1968 traveled from San Francisco to New York to be with him. He did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with Caserta's disappointment. The Woodstock concert film includes 37 seconds of Joplin and Caserta walking together before they reached the tent where Joplin waited for her turn to perform. By the time the festival took place in August 1969, both were intravenous heroin addicts.

According to Caserta's book Going Down With Janis, which Caserta has since disowned, Joplin introduced her to her boyfriend Seth Morgan in Joplin's room at the Landmark Motor Hotel on September 29, 1970. Caserta "had seen him around" in San Francisco but had not met him. At some point, an agreement was made for a threesome to take place the following Friday although Caserta later made alternate plans. Morgan made alternate plans, believing Caserta would be with Joplin that evening. Each one was unaware the other had bowed out. The day after Joplin introduced Caserta to Morgan, Caserta saw Joplin briefly when Caserta accommodated her new Los Angeles friend, 19-year-old Debbie Nuciforo. Nuciforo was an aspiring rock drummer who wanted to meet Joplin and was high on heroin at the time. The meeting of the three women was reportedly brief and unpleasant. Caserta suspected the reason for Joplin's foul mood was that Morgan had abandoned her earlier that day after having spent less than 24 hours with her.

Legacy

Legacy in the 1970s

Joplin's death in October 1970 at age 27 stunned her fans and shocked the music world, especially when coupled with the deaths of Canned Heat guitarist Alan Wilson a month earlier, and rock icon Jimi Hendrix 16 days earlier, both aged 27. All three musicians performed at the two biggest rock festivals of the 1960s: Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. This would later cause some people to attribute significance to the death of musicians at the age of 27, as celebrated in the "27 Club". Music historian Tom Moon wrote that Joplin had "a devastatingly original voice", music columnist Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that Joplin as an artist was "overpowering and deeply vulnerable" and author Megan Terry said that Joplin was the female version of Elvis Presley in her ability to captivate an audience. Joplin was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals with a distinctive rock and roll rasping vocal quality, as well as her "electric" stage presence. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of "Piece of My Heart", "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball and Chain", and "Summertime", as well as her original song "Mercedes Benz", which was her final recording.

A book about Joplin by her publicist Myra Friedman titled Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (1973) was excerpted in many newspapers. At the same time, Peggy Caserta's memoir, Going Down With Janis (1973), attracted much attention; its provocative title is a reference to Caserta's claim that she had engaged in oral sex with Joplin while they were high on heroin in September 1970. The description provided by Dan Knapp, Caserta's co-author whom she denounced decades later, repelled many people in 1973 when few books or filmed interviews of Joplin or her loved ones were accessible to the public. Joplin's bandmate Sam Andrew described Caserta as "halfway between a groupie and a friend" in an interview with writer Ellis Amburn. Soon after the 1973 publication of Going Down With Janis, Joplin's friends learned that graphic descriptions of sexual acts and intravenous drug use were not the only portions of the book that would haunt them.

According to Kim Chappell, a close friend of Caserta and Joplin who is mentioned many times in Going Down With Janis, the 1973 publication of it angered the Los Angeles heroin dealer whom it describes in detail. The make and model of his car are included. According to Amburn, in 1973, a "carful of dope dealers" visited a Los Angeles lesbian bar that Caserta had been frequenting. Caserta was not on the premises at the time. Chappell, who was in the alley behind the bar, stated: "I was stabbed because, when Peggy's book came out, her dealer, the same one who'd given Janis her last fix, didn't like it that he was referred to and was out to get Peggy. He couldn't find her, so he went for her lover. When they realized who I was, they felt that my death would also hit Peggy, and so they stabbed me." Despite being "stabbed three times in the chest, puncturing both lungs," Chappell eventually recovered.

Legacy in 1980s and 1990s

In 1988, on what would have been Joplin's 45th birthday, the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original gold, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark, was dedicated during a ceremony in Port Arthur, Texas. In 1992, the first major biography of Joplin in two decades, Love, Janis, authored by her younger sister Laura Joplin, was published. In an interview, Laura stated that Joplin enjoyed being on the Dick Cavett Show, that Joplin had difficulties with some, but not all, people at Thomas Jefferson High School and that Joplin enthusiastically talked about Woodstock with her parents and siblings during a visit to their Texas home a few weeks after she had performed at the festival.

In 1995, Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, becoming the first female solo artist to achieve it in her first year of eligibility. In 2005, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In November 2009, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum honored her as part of its annual American Music Masters Series; among the artifacts at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum exhibition are Joplin's scarf and necklaces, her psychedelically painted 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet and a sheet of LSD blotting paper designed by Robert Crumb, designer of the Cheap Thrills cover. Also in 2009, Joplin was the honoree at the Rock Hall's American Music Master concert and lecture series. In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created and directed by Randal Myler, with input from Janis' younger sister Laura and Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim, played to packed houses and was held over several times.

Legacy after 2010

In 2013 Washington's Arena Stage featured a production of A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies in which Joplin performs a concert for the audience while telling stories of her past inspirations, including those of Odetta and Aretha Franklin. The production transferred to Broadway, then went on tour in 2016. In August 2024 the Tony-nominated musical opened at London's Peacock Theatre with Davies again in the lead role.

On November 4, 2013, Joplin was awarded with the 2,510th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the music industry. Her star is located at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of Musicians Institute. On August 8, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service revealed a commemorative stamp honoring Joplin as part of its Music Icons stamp series during a first-day-of-issue ceremony at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park. Among the memorabilia Joplin left behind is a Gibson Hummingbird guitar. In 2015, the biographical documentary film Janis: Little Girl Blue, directed by Amy J. Berg and narrated by Cat Power, was released. It was a New York Times Critics' Pick.

After Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" and number 28 on its 2008 list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time", she was then re-ranked in 2023; In 2023, Rolling Stone then ranked Joplin at number 78 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time. Also in 2023, NPR dubbed Joplin as the "Queen of Rock" and named her one of the "50 Great Voices". As of 2013, she remains one of the top-selling vocalists in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certifications of 18.5 million albums sold.

Influence

Joplin had a profound influence on many singers, including Steven Tyler and Stevie Nicks. Pink said about Joplin: "She was so inspiring by singing blues music when it wasn't culturally acceptable for white women, and she wore her heart on her sleeve. She was so witty and charming and intelligent, but she also battled an ugly-duckling syndrome." Hearing Joplin is what inspired Japanese rock pioneer Carmen Maki to switch from folk to rock music.

Discography

Joplin recorded four albums in her four-year career. The first two albums were recorded with and credited to Big Brother and the Holding Company; the later two were recorded with different backing bands and released as solo albums. Posthumous releases have included previously unreleased studio and live material.

Filmography

Monterey Pop (1968)

Petulia (1968)

Janis Joplin and Her Group (1969)

Janis Joplin Live in Frankfurt (1969)

Janis (1974)

Janis: The Way She Was (1974)

Comin' Home (1988)

Woodstock – The Lost Performances (1991)

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (Director's Cut) (1994)

Festival Express (2003)

Nine Hundred Nights (2004)

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons (2005) Shout Factory

Rockin' at the Red Dog: The Dawn of Psychedelic Rock (2005)

This is Tom Jones (2007) 1969 appearance on TV show

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (Director's Cut) 40th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Janis Joplin with Big Brother: Ball and Chain (DVD) Charly (2009)

Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015)