Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin grew up an outsider in Port Arthur, Texas — too loud, too strange, too interested in the blues and Bessie Smith — and found her people in San Francisco’s psychedelic scene when she joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966. Her performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, two back-to-back sets that left the crowd stunned, made her a star overnight.

Her voice was unlike anything else in rock: a blues shouter’s power, a gospel singer’s abandon, and a country singer’s ache all at once, capable of going from a whisper to a scream within a phrase. She modeled it on Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey — the classic blues women — and applied it to rock material in a way that crossed barriers that had largely held in American music.

Cheap Thrills (1968) with Big Brother — its cover by R. Crumb, its sound deliberately raw — became a landmark of the San Francisco sound. She went solo, adding horn sections and more complex arrangements on I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama! (1969) and the unfinished Pearl (completed posthumously in 1971), which included “Me and Bobby McGee” — a Kris Kristofferson song she made entirely her own. She died of a heroin overdose in October 1970, aged 27, weeks after Jimi Hendrix.