What we have is not everything. Four studio albums, a handful of live recordings, the official releases, the posthumous compilations, the carefully curated archive that Sony and the Joplin estate have maintained for 55 years. That is what we have. What we almost had, what existed and was not captured or was captured and not released or was captured imperfectly and lives on the margins of official history is a different story. This is that story.
The first song Janis Joplin ever sang in public was Silver Threads and Golden Needles. Fred Gill’s Bar, Austin, Texas, 1962. She was 19 years old. She stepped onto the small stage with an autoharp and she sang the old country song, not gracefully, not with the controlled technique she would develop over the following years, but with the specific raw energy of someone who had something inside them that needed to come out and had just found a way to let it.
Kenneth Threadgill heard it. He gave her two free beers to stop singing, not because she was bad, but because he didn’t want to follow her. Silver Threads and Golden Needles was never officially recorded by Janis Joplin. It exists in the accounts of people who were in that bar. It exists in the memory of the song itself, which she chose as her first public utterance.
It does not exist on any album. That is where this story begins. Between 1962 and 1966, before the Big Brother years, before San Francisco, before Monterey, Janis Joplin was building a repertoire that would never be fully documented. The Austin folk scene, the bars around Lamar University, the specific mix of country, folk, and blues that she absorbed in Texas before she found the rock context that made her famous.
She covered Bessie Smith, she covered Billie Holiday, she covered Big Mama Thornton and Lead Belly and songs from the specific American tradition that she had been absorbing since Port Arthur. Almost none of this survives in official form. Some of it survives in bootleg recordings of uncertain quality, in tapes made by other musicians who were in those rooms, in the specific imperfect archaeology of a musical education that happened mostly in bars and living rooms before anyone thought to document it. The voice that stopped the world at Monterey was built on a foundation that we can only partially hear. Big Brother and the Holding Company 1966 to 1968, the official releases from this period are two albums, the self-titled debut on Mainstream Records and Cheap Thrills on Columbia. Together they contain perhaps 40 minutes of music. What they don’t
contain is the full repertoire of a band that performed regularly for 2 years before recording anything and continued performing after Cheap Thrills was released. The sets at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore West and the smaller venues that preceded both, those sets contain songs that never made albums.
She covered Bobby Blue Bland, she covered Etta James, she sang versions of songs that the band would later drop or that didn’t fit the album format or that simply existed in the live context and were never considered for recording. Some of these exist in audience recordings, the specific imperfect capture of someone in the crowd with a device pointed toward the stage, the sound quality varying from adequate to barely decipherable.
Her voice always identifiable regardless. There are enough of these recordings circulated among collectors for 50 years to understand that the official Janis Joplin discography represents a fraction of what she actually sang. The Festival Express, July 1970, a train traveled across Canada for 11 days carrying Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead and Buddy Guy and The Band and a dozen other major acts.
The concerts at each stop were documented. The journey between stops was not not officially, not completely. What happened on that train in the late nights between cities was some of the most unguarded music making of Janis Joplin’s career. Musicians gathered in the dining car with instruments and alcohol and the specific openness that comes from being in motion between performances, away from the pressure of the stage. They sang to each other.
They improvised. They covered songs. They found out what happened when their musical worlds collided without an audience watching. Some of this was filmed. The 2004 Festival Express documentary captured portions of it, but not all of it. Not the 3:00 a.m. moments. Not every song. Not every exchange between musicians who were all in different ways at the height of their powers in the summer of 1970.
What exists is evidence of what could have been preserved. The Pearl sessions. Paul Rothchild said they were the most professional recording sessions he had ever produced with her. She arrived prepared. She knew what she wanted. She worked methodically through the material. What the official Pearl release does not contain are the warm-up takes, the between song conversations, the moments when she tried something and discarded it, the songs that were considered and not recorded, the rehearsal material that existed before the sessions began. Some of this material may exist in the Columbia Records archive. Some of it almost certainly does not. Buried Alive in the Blues exists on Pearl as an instrumental, the track for which her vocal was never recorded because she died the day before she was scheduled to record it. The vocal she would have sung exists only in some version of imagination and in the accounts of
people who knew what she intended. That absence is the most famous gap in her discography, but it is not the only one. There is a specific quality to music that was not intended to be recorded. The warm-up take before the official take, the rehearsal run-through, the late-night version sung for the people in the room rather than for posterity.
The improvisation that happened once and was never repeated. In these unguarded moments, something different is available. Not better necessarily. The official recordings exist because they were the best versions, the most complete, the most realized, but different. More exploratory, more willing to risk being imperfect.
The bootleg recordings of Janis Joplin that circulated among collectors, of varying quality, of uncertain provenance, capture this quality sometimes. The voice that exists in them is the same voice as on the official albums and also not the same. Less managed, more willing to go somewhere unexpected. She was that kind of singer in all contexts, but in the unrecorded moments, the quality was different.
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Some of those moments were caught. Many were not. What does it mean that so much of what Janis Joplin sang was never officially recorded? It means that what we call her legacy is a selection, a careful, thoughtful, well-maintained selection, but a selection nonetheless. The albums are the photographs that were developed. There were others taken that we don’t have.
For a voice like hers, a voice that existed in the performance, in the room, in the specific live moment more than it existed in the controlled studio environment, the gap between what was recorded and what was sung may be larger than for other artists. She gave everything in every performance. The official recordings are evidence of that.
But, they are not the complete evidence. Silver Threads and Golden Needles, the Avalon Ballroom sets, the train between cities, the warm-up takes, the songs she sang once for the people in the room, they exist somewhere. In tapes, in boxes, in the imperfect memory of recordings made without permission, in the memories of people still living who were there. Some of it will surface.
Some of it is already gone. What we have is extraordinary. What we almost had was more. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
