Janis Joplin: Texan girl, blues queen and hippie pioneer

Born on January 19, 1943, Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. Culturally conservative and bourgeois, the mid-sized oil refinery city was a protected environment for Janis and her younger brother and sister. She wrote poems, painted and sang in the local church choir. Then came the problems of adolescence…

Gaining weight, battling acne and teased by her classmates, Janis stayed by herself and neglected school. Feeling that she didn’t belong, she began to demonstrate it by wearing men's clothes. Finding consolation and meaning in art and music, she discovered the blues and made music with a few friends. After high school, she trained as a secretary and enrolled in college twice but dropped out.

This picture from the family album shows Janis playing and singing folk songs and was taken shortly before she went to California to become a singer. Janis Joplin gave her first public performance in Texas — at an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center, of all places.

Alcohol and drugs were the accompaniment to her singing career from the beginning. She sang in clubs and made recordings with Jorma Kaukonen, the guitarist in Jefferson Airplane. It was a shaky start to a career in music, however. Usually drunk, stoned or both, she was called "Speed Freak." She returned to Texas after a couple of years.

After a short stay in Texas, it was back to San Francisco. Settling in the hippie district of Haight Ashbury, she joined forces with Big Brother and the Holding Company, a blues band. With them, Janis developed her unique hoarse and soulful singing style. The debut album came in 1967. Along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, she stunned audiences at the Monterey Pop Festival.

The following album, "Cheap Thrills," was Joplin's first major recording success. She hurled her songs into the microphone so furiously that it almost hurt. The Holding Company began to hold back and really accompany Janis. Her first chart hits came in 1968, "Piece Of My Heart" and "Ball And Chain," and the album went gold. Janis Joplin had become a star — and a figurehead of the hippie movement.

After Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janis looked for a band with musicians of a quality equal to her voice. The Kozmic Blues Band was founded with a bunch of excellent musicians, but it was too big. After the record "I Got Them Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama," the group was thinned out and then went by the name of The Full Tilt Boogie Band.

Janis' short and turbulent life also saw a brief time in police custody. Having threatened a policeman with physical violence, she spent a night in jail. Her lawyer managed to free her, arguing that she had the right to freedom of expression. Later, she had to pay a fine for swearing and obscene behavior onstage.

Janis's flamboyant personality, her loud, dirty laugh, sociability and lots of alcohol attracted hangers-on like moths to a flame. She had intimate encounters with both sexes, and her free lifestyle inspired feminists. Party scenes like this one are shown in the 2015 documentary "Janis: A Little Girl Blue" by director Amy Berg.

If the party was over and no one was available for the night, she could always rely on Southern Comfort. The whisky manufacturer gave her $15,000 for having publicized the brand. This picture taken after a concert doesn't show an advertising model but instead the loneliest person in the world.

Janis Joplin lived her life as excessively as did her male counterparts Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. All three lived short, intense lives, had burgeoning careers and died at age 27 — and all three within a short space of time.

Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970 of an overdose of heroin. Accident or suicide? It's said that she hadn't known that she'd taken a highly concentrated dose of the drug. Blues singer Eric Burdon of The Animals summed it up: "The queen of the blues didn't die of an overdose of heroin, but of an overdose of Janis."