7/28/2023 0 Comments Janis joplin height![]() King said that when he first heard the blues it was like having a toothache and someone gives you something soothing that stops the pain. She was fascinated with Bessie Smith, whose singing was described by Carl Van Vechten as Smith “cutting her heart open with a knife, until it was exposed …so that we suffered as she suffered, exposed with a rhythmic ferocity”. She immersed herself in the music, poured over books on the subject, and listened to old 78 records she ordered by mail. Her solution was to sleep indiscriminately with both men and women.īefore she was confident enough to perform in front of others, she had discovered the blues. Conflicted emotions about being attracted to both men and women in a state where such behavior was still considered criminal did not help her inner turmoil. By the time she found the blues, the hole in her soul was just too big and too deep.īy the tender age of 17 and long before her short-lived fame, Joplin was already abusing alcohol and pills to the point where she was hospitalized on at least one occasion. This slow, aching realization that emerged from her formative years – she was never going to fit the ’50s-era mold of a sweet girl with bobby socks and a cute hairdo – her a desperate creature at a young age, in constant need of love and approval. Hers was the kind of different that people around her would never accept. Hers was the kind of sadness that comes slowly over the course of growing into adulthood when you realize that you’re still different, and not in a good way. Always had been.īy the time Joplin made it to Austin to attend art classes at the University of Texas in 1962, she’d already been through hell and back compared to the average 19-year middle-class white girl. She’d been carrying a sadness with her for some time. ![]() There’s truth to this story, however, as is often the case, there’s more to it: things were complicated for Janis. Soon thereafter, she hitchhiked to San Francisco where she found fame and recognition, only to die far too young from a drug overdose. It’s said that she didn’t discover who she was and how she might fit in until she went to college in Austin and found her calling, singing the blues with other college beatniks. According to musical lore, blues rocker Janis Joplin grew up an outcast in her own hometown on the coast of Texas in the 1950s.
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