Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer-songwriter who sang rock, soul, and blues music. She was closely linked to the emerging hippie movement centered around Haight-Ashbury. Haight-Ashbury refers to a district in San Francisco known for being a hub of counterculture and the hippie movement during the 1960s.
She performed at the Woodstock Festival and the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin made it to the Billboard Hot 100, with her cover of the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee" reaching number 1 in March 1971. Her most popular songs include cover versions of "Piece of My Heart," "Cry Baby," "Down on Me," "Ball and Chain," and "Summertime," along with her original song "Mercedes Benz," which was her final recording.
Joplin died tragically young of a heroin dose at the age of 27. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time[1] and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 15.5 million albums sold.
She had relationships with various men, including Joe McDonald, who wrote the song "Janis" for her, Kris Kristofferson, and Seth Morgan, to whom she was engaged at the time of her death. In 1963, she was briefly in a relationship with a woman named Jae Whitaker. They lived together until Whitaker broke it off because of Joplin's drug use and infidelity.
Over the years, Joplin had an on-again-off-again romance with Peggy Caserta, founder of the Haight-Ashbury hippie boutique Mnasidika. Caserta wrote about their relationship in her memoir I Ran Into Some Trouble (2018).