That was when she was “for the first time, playing in a band with electric instruments,” George-Warren says. Joplin moved to San Francisco, where she stayed, in 1966, joining Big Brother and the Holding Company.

She began performing live, playing folk and blues with a group called the Waller Creek Boys. George-Warren says Joplin found her people when she came to Austin in the early 1960s. She was wearing big, floppy shirts over tights, barefooted half the time.” “Janis was letting her hair hang down, long. “This was still the era where most of the gals were still wearing the shirtwaist dresses and bobby socks, the loafers and the bouffant beehive hairdos,” she says. Joplin’s style was at odds with the time, too, George-Warren says. “But once she read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when it came out – once she discovered music that was pretty verboten in white neighborhoods in Port Arthur … she became obsessed with that music.” And of course, she was also a very talented painter,” George-Warren says. She did very well at school, and she got awards for her writing ability. “She had a very loving, supportive family. She had been happy and popular in her hometown of Port Arthur, but as she gravitated toward blues music, and the freer lifestyle of the 1960s, George-Warren says Joplin’s community rejected her. In her early life, Joplin wasn’t so self-assured. And suddenly, I hear her coming up with guitar parts, figuring out different tempos, new arrangements of the songs. “She never talked about how hard she worked to get to where she was and become the musician she was. “I got to hear this woman – … she kind of painted this persona,” George-Warren says. In the new biography, Janis: Her Life and Music, author Holly George-Warren says Joplin was much more of a musical and creative force than people realize. Joplin’s greatest musical success, the album, “Pearl,” was released after her death from a heroin overdose in 1970. She did that, and more, becoming the biggest female rock star of the era. She didn’t fit in in Port Arthur, where she grew up, and she wanted to make a name for herself as a musician. Janis Joplin left her Texas home in the early 1960s.

Janis joplin rio