
So when Janis was in high school, speaking out for racial integration during a social studies class discussion, she became a target.” Port Arthur was conservative, and had an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. “The world was changing,” Laura says, “and Janis’s interpretation of being good included things that a lot of people in the south weren’t yet ready to include. Along with that came a bright-eyed intelligence and independence. The classic free-spirited artist in the making.

Your audience needs to hear you!’”īy high school, Janis was painting, strumming folk songs on her guitar, reading Jack Kerouac, writing for the school paper, and wearing sweatshirts, tight jeans and loafers without socks. And she’d stop you as you were carrying the towels across the living room, and say: ‘Support those notes.
Janis joplin band start how to#
When we did laundry, and my mom, who’d been a singer, had show tunes on, it was about learning how to sing. So we grew up believing that music was serious. Dad was trying to get us to feel the power of the emotion in the music. The one that comes to mind was a Pablo Casals concerto. She says: “My dad would sit us down to listen to his favourite records. Janis later said: “It was a town filled with bowling alleys, rednecks and plumbers, leading such tacky lives.”īut Janis and her younger siblings Laura and Michael were encouraged in art and music and, in Laura’s words, “given permission to be different”. Janis’s dad was an engineer for Texaco, her mom a registrar at a local business college. By January 19, 1943, when Janis Lyn Joplin was born, Texaco and Gulf Oil had set up refining industries there. Six years later a gusher put it on the map as one of Texas’s new oil meccas. Port Arthur was established in 1895 as a railroad stop. Janis the young folkie (Image credit: Alamy)Ī little about the town without pity.
