Janis Joplin Products
Janis Joplin (19 January 1943 - 4 October 1970) was an American singer-songwriter and music arranger. Her screaming, soulful voice is in many ways considered a personification of the Flower Power Era (along with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, Grace Slick and many others). She came to symbolize energy of the psychedelic, Haight-Ashbury, love beads, love ins, free love, flower children, black light posters and incense, expansion of consciousness, spiritualism soaked in the unusual drug idealism of the late 1960s. It was a time of bright hope and optimism and the shedding of many social-psychological-sexual traditions that went sour.
Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas. As a teenager, Joplin was a social outcast in her school, during which time she befriended other so-called outcasts, one of which had albums by African-American artists such as Bessie Smith, Odetta, and Memphis Minnie, all of whom Joplin later credited for inspiring her to become a singer-songwriter herself. Janis debuted with a singing style not heard before on the playlists of white American radio stations. Her singing was more like that of Aretha Franklin and other blues/gospel singers than the typical white girl songstress. Upon discovering that Bessie Smith had been buried in an unmarked grave, Janis provided a headstone in August 1970, just two months before she herself passed away.
She died from a heroin overdose on 4 October 1970, She is a member of the “27 club,” a group composed of musicians who all died at the age of 27, along with other artists including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Brian Jones.
