Janis Lyn Joplin was born on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas. She is still considered one of the most influential rock and blues singers, and belongs to the unofficial Club 27.

Janis Joplin was a model child. She could read even before she started school. In her free time, she engaged in art and poetry, and sang in the church choir. She was an intelligent and ambitious child.
She eventually discovered blues and folk music.
After graduating from high school in 1960, at the age of 18 she went to Los Angeles California, to become a singer. She made her first public appearance in late 1961 at the Halfway House in Beaumont Texas. She sang in pubs and folk clubs. Accompanied, among others, by Jorma Kaukonen, the guitarist from Jefferson Airplane.
Inspired by records by Leadbelly, Odetta Holmes and Bessie Smith, her greatest role model, she advanced to become the "Queen of the White" with her unrestrained singing style, which was unique for a white singer until then blues rock". In 1962 Janis Joplin returned to Austin Texas. At college in Austin, she was noticed as an outsider because of her clothes.
Her career began in 1966 when she moved to San Francisco and joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, with whom she successfully performed at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival she received a recording contract with Mainstream Records from Bob Shad, who released the album Big Brother & the Holding Company Featuring Janis Joplin.
The album Cheap Thrills followed in 1968 for the Columbia Records label
Her second record already contained many of her well-known ones Pieces like the cover version of Erma Franklin's Piece of My Heart or Ball and Chain. After the studio recordings, Janis Joplin traveled to Nepal.
At the end of 1968, Janis Joplin left the band and put together a larger band with her record company. This had no name for a long time, but was called the Kozmic Blues Band after the third Joplin album that followed.

The band had their most famous performance in 1969 at the Woodstock Festival.

In April 1970, their third band, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, was assembled. For Janis Joplin, this turned out to be a stroke of luck. The team harmonized emotionally and musically. The songs with the Full Tilt Boogie Band would be their most successful. In September 1970, the band reunited at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles to record their third Columbia LP, Pearl. On October 1, she recorded the a cappella song Mercedes Benz there. The last time Joplin was at Sunset Sound studios on October 3, just before the studio recording was to end, was to listen to tapes of tracks she was due to record over the following days. When she didn't show up at the studio by the afternoon of the next day as arranged, John Cooke drove to the Landmark Motel, where Joplin had been staying since August 24, to check on her. He found her lying dead on the floor.

According to official figures, Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970 from a heroin overdose. Joplin's body was cremated and the ashes buried on the California coast in Marin County Bay in the Pacific. The track Buried Alive in the Blues on the album Pearl is missing the vocal track. Janis Joplin should have sung it on October 5, 1970.
Janis Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in November 2013.