It is January 19, 1943: On this Tuesday, 80 years ago today, Janis Joplin was born in the arch-conservative small town of Port Arthur in southern Texas. Janis is the first child of Dorothy and Seth Ward Joplin. The mother is an office worker and the father works for an oil company. Her hometown is the deep south of the United States. There is still racial segregation here. Can a white girl love African American music? Or even against racial segregation, which was to be maintained here for many years to come?
Janis won't care - as she will always break many conventions in her life. She swears, drinks alcohol as a teenager, later she wears men's clothes and dazzling, colorful outfits or something shaggy, dyes her hair orange. During her short life she defies pretty much all the good manners that her homeland stands for.
At home in Texas, as a child and in her teens at school, she is an outsider, a chubby with acne who, as she will later recall, is bullied by classmates. She thinks her homeland is stuffy. There, they expect her "after you graduate from school to get married, have a bunch of children and keep your mouth shut," as she will say as a young adult. As a child she read a lot, she has a talent for drawing and sings in the church choir. But later, as a young adult, she wants to get out of this environment, which she perceives as stuffy confinement. Eventually she goes to California, it's freer there.
With her loud, powerful voice, which she says she discovered by accident when she was about 17, she has had a lightning-fast world career on the border between blues and rock, after having been touring around clubs and bars with her band with little success for a while.
The breakthrough to become the first female rock superstar came when she was 24: her performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 left the audience silent in awe, so captivated was her powerful, unique voice. From then on, Janis Joplin is world famous - and she has a record deal.
This time as a world star will only last a good three and a half years, during which she will sing songs like "Cry Baby", "Get it While You Can" or "Mercedes Benz". She will only be 27 years old.
Janis Joplin drinks a lot of alcohol, likes "Southern Comfort", a liquor flavored with whiskey, orange and vanilla, as evidenced by many photos from the time. Also, she takes drugs.
One of the triggers for her excessive addiction was the pressure to succeed that set in after her breakthrough, according to assessments of her and her time, the hippie era, which was initially free and wild, but whose music gradually became commercialized.
Janis Joplin injects heroin, which eventually kills her. The singer died of an overdose on October 4, 1970. Recording of her third record is slated when the world - two weeks after Jimi Hendrix's death - learns that the singer has been found lifeless on a hotel room floor.
She wanted to live in the fast lane, as Joplin once said. And guaranteed not to become like their parents. Despite this public contempt, the relationship with her family never broke off, Joplin bequeathed her fortune to her siblings - after her a brother and a sister were born - and her parents. In addition, she reserved a few hundred in her will for a party at her funeral, to which her friends were invited. Her friends should drink to her properly.
She knew that her life would end early. She signed her will just days before her death. And she rejected a doctor's warning to live healthier, as she reported in a newspaper article in the late 1960s: "I'd rather have ten fantastic years than turn 70 and just sit in a damn armchair and watch TV," is quoted from it in a biography about her.
Janis Joplin would have turned 80 this Thursday.
Sources: WDR, SRF, Deutsche Welle, BR
See in the photo series: Whether musician or model, actor or artist: anyone who needs a strong portrait often turns to Olaf Heine. The works of the German photographer can currently be seen in a Berlin exhibition.
