The tuxedoed Welsh crooner invited the era’s most volcanic rock singer onto his prime-time variety show, handed her a Stax soul number, and got thoroughly, gloriously out-sung on his own stage.
By 1969, Tom Jones was a transatlantic superstar with his own glossy American variety show, and the format was simple: the Welshman in a dinner jacket, a big orchestra, and a parade of guests pulled toward his polished, full-throated style. Then Janis Joplin walked on. What followed — a duet on the Stax soul number Raise Your Hand — is remembered as one of the most electric performances the program ever aired, and one of the rare moments where a guest didn’t get pulled toward Jones so much as drag the whole stage somewhere wilder.
Neither of them wrote it, and it wasn’t a hit for either. Raise Your Hand was a 1967 Stax single by Eddie Floyd, co-written by Floyd with guitarist Steve Cropper and label executive Alvertis “Al Bell” Isbell. Floyd — the Detroit-raised soul man best known for “Knock on Wood” — took it to No. 16 on the R&B chart and No. 79 on the Hot 100, a modest showing for a song that would have a much louder second life. Its call-and-response structure and gospel-rooted lift made it perfect raw material for a singer who could turn a stage into a tent revival.
From a Stax B-side to Joplin’s stage
That singer was Janis Joplin. By 1969 she had left Big Brother and the Holding Company and made Raise Your Hand a fixture of her own incendiary live set — she performed it at the Woodstock Festival that August, and her studio rendition would later surface on the 1993 compilation Janis. For Joplin the song was an invitation to do exactly what she did best: push a crowd to its feet through sheer force of will. So when she brought it to Jones’s show, she wasn’t covering an obscure track — she was bringing one of her own showstoppers into a setting built for someone else.
The contrast is the whole point. Jones, the trained baritone with impeccable control, versus Joplin, all raw nerve and Texas grit, voice cracking and soaring as it pleased. On paper it shouldn’t have worked — the Las Vegas headliner and the counterculture icon, the tuxedo and the feathers — and that mismatch is exactly why it crackles. Jones, to his credit, doesn’t try to tame her; he goes with her, and the two of them push each other higher through the song’s repeated build.
Two belters, one stage, no surrender
This Is Tom Jones ran on Britain’s ATV and in the United States from 1969 to 1971, and it drew an extraordinary range of guests — Sammy Davis Jr., Sonny and Cher, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young among them. Jones, who controlled the musical guest list and whose own first love had been the blues, used the platform to share a stage with artists far outside the easy-listening lane his image suggested. For many who remember the series, the Joplin duet was its peak: two of the most powerful voices of the era trading lines and refusing to yield, with a famous closing beat in which Jones reaches to embrace her and Joplin, unbowed to the end, pushes him away.
Joplin died of a heroin overdose in October 1970, barely a year after the taping, at the age of 27 — making this performance one of a finite number of high-quality filmed documents of her in full flight. That it survives at all, and that it pairs her with so unlikely a partner, has kept it alive for generations of viewers who keep rediscovering it. A modest Memphis soul tune, handed between a Welsh crooner and a Texas firebrand, became a few minutes of television that neither the medium nor the song has ever quite matched again.
SONG INFORMATION
Artists: Tom Jones & Janis Joplin
Song: “Raise Your Hand”
Performance:This Is Tom Jones (ATV), 1969
Songwriters: Eddie Floyd, Steve Cropper, Alvertis Isbell
