Janis Joplin and her triumph after death

He didn’t like it and at Sunset Sound Recorders studios in Los Angeles, they were worried. . The singer Janis Joplin had promised to go and record their voices for the song Buried alive in the blues. The hours wore on and producer Paul Rothchil began to worry. To dispel any doubts, her tour manager John Cooke visited the Landmark Motor Hotel, where the star was staying.

Cooke was in for a brutal surprise . Janis Joplin, 27, had died. His lifeless body lay on the floor next to his bed. Later, it was indicated that the star died around 1:45 p.m. October 4, 1970, and that the cause would have been a heroin overdose.

At the time, Joplin was focusing on his solo career, alongside the Full Tilt Boogie Band as his backing band. This after becoming a star of Big Brother and the Holding Company (from then on they are Piece of my heart And Summer time ) and later with the Kozmic Blues Band. All in just 3 years, since the “summer of love” of 1967.

In the 1970s, Joplin focused on new recordings. After his death, they were released posthumously on an album titled Pearl, released in 1971. The first single was released on January 12, 1971 and was titled Me and Bobby McGee.

It was not Joplin who composed the song, but Kris Kristofferson. “Bobby McGee This is the song that made the difference for me. Every time I sing it, I think of Janis,” Kristofferson told Performing Songwriter in 2015.

In reality, it was a commissioned song, as he comments in The Ultimate Book of Country Music Quotations: “I had just gone to work for Combine Music. Fred Foster, the owner, called me and said, “I have a title for you: ‘Me and Bobbie McKee,’ and I thought he said ‘McGee.’ I thought I could never write this, and it took me months to hide from it, because I can’t write on an assignment. But it must have stayed in the back of my mind. One day I was driving from Morgan City to New Orleans. It was raining and the windshield wipers were working. I had an old experience with another girl in another country. I had finished it by the time I got to Nashville.

Foster took the name of real-life Bobby McGee , as indicated by the specialist portal Songfacts. He used the name of a secretary as inspiration for the title, who was actually named Bobbi McKee. Thus, by naming the character in the song “Bobby”, he ensured that a singer could sing it without changing it, since “Bobby” could refer to a man or a woman.

The song had already had a version, in 1969, by country musician Roger Miller. In his lyrics, very much in the traveling spirit of the time, he tells the story of two young lovers who travel together, but separate to discover the world for themselves. Something Joplin did, always on the move, like a free spirit. It is an era greatly influenced by On the way the founding novel of Jack Kerouac which talks about initiatory journeys, the way we leave one life without turning around to look for another.

The final image of the song, the one that marks this road character, came to Kristofferson by chance as he was walking to the airport in the pouring rain to catch the flight home. “I said, ‘With the windshield wipers beating to the beat and Bobby clapping, we finally sang every song the driver knew.’ And that was it.”

Janis Joplin didn’t see this Me and Bobby McGee It was a resounding success, rising to number 1 on the raknings. Quite an honor. It is the second song to reach number one in the United States following the artist’s death. The first? Bay wharf, by Otis Redding. Either way, the song gave the singer tickets to immortality.