Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer, songwriter, and music arranger, from Port Arthur, Texas. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later a solo career. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Joplin #46 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. She died in Los Angeles, California of a drug overdose, at the age of 27.

Janis Joplin’s screaming soulful voice in many ways is a personification of the Flower Power Era (along with Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and many others). She came to symbolize energy of the Psychedelic, Haight Ashbury, love beads, love ins, free love, flower children, black light posters and incense, expansion of consciousness, spiritualism soaked in the unusual drug idealism of the late 1960’s. It was a time of bright hope and optimism and the shedding of many social-psychological-sexual tra