Janis Joplin

The singer from Port Arthur who spent four years at the front of American music and changed what a woman was allowed to sound like on a stage. Janis Joplin was born in east Texas in 1943, the daughter of a Texaco engineer, and grew up a self-described misfit who studied painting and listened to Bessie Smith, Leadbelly and Big Mama Thornton. She left for San Francisco in 1963 and joined Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1966. The Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 did the rest: she went on as the singer in a little-known psychedelic band and came off as the most talked-about performer in the country.

Two albums with Big Brother, including Cheap Thrills, then a solo career with the Kozmic Blues Band and afterward the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She played Woodstock in 1969 and rode the Festival Express across Canada in 1970. Five of her singles reached the Billboard Hot 100, and Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee went to No.1 in March 1971 — four months after she died in Los Angeles on October 4, 1970, at twenty-seven. Pearl came out that January and topped the album chart. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, and she remains one of the highest-selling American vocalists, with 18.5 million certified albums.