Happy birthday Janis Joplin, you have been 72 today. Joplin bought her powerful, bluesy voice from Texas to San Francisco’s psychedelic scene and became a superstar. Her biographer Myra Friedman wrote: “It wasn’t only her voice that thrilled, with its amazing range and strength and awesome wails. To see her was to be sucked into a maelstrom of feeling that words can barely suggest.” Born in the oil refining town of Port Arthur in Texas, Joplin was drawn to blues singers like Odetta, Leadbelly and Bessie Smith and soul in Otis Redding, Tina Turner and Etta James. After performing folk blues on the coffeehouse circuit in Texas and San Francisco, she hooking up with Big Brother - guitarists James Gurley and Sam Andrew, bassist Peter Albin and drummer David Getz - producing a melange of blues and psychedelia. Lilian Roxon later summed her up to a tee. “[Janis Joplin] perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation – to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love; to [reject] every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life.” https://youtube/watch?v=bn5TNqjuHiU
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 18:50:08 +0000
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