You know the song. Everyone knows the song. Peace of my heart. Janice Joplain, 1968. Cheap Thrills number one. The voice that tears the room apart. Sam Andrews distorted guitar. The specific rawness of a performance that sounds like it could not have been contained by a studio and barely was.
You know that version. Almost everyone does. What almost no one knows is the true story of how that song came to exist. The songwriter who died before he heard it. The woman who recorded it first and didn’t recognize her own song when it came back to her on the radio. The musician who refused it. The chain of events that had to happen exactly as it did for Janice Joplain to stand at that microphone. This is that story.
Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Burns wrote Peace of My Heart in 1967. Bert Burns was one of the most gifted and least celebrated figures in American pop music. He had written Twist and Shout. Yes, that Twist and Shout, the one the Beatles covered. He had written Here Comes the Night for Van Morrison. He had written Hang on Sloopy.
He was a hitmaker of the First Order, a man who understood what made a song work in the specific physical way that only the best songwriters do. In 1967, he had his own label, Shout Records, and he was producing a young Irish singer named Van Morrison, who had just released his debut album and was the most promising new voice in rock music.
Burns brought Van Morrison the new song he had written with Ragavoy. Morrison listened. He said no. He wanted to do his own material. He was done covering other people’s songs. The song Burns was offering him was good, but it wasn’t his. He declined. Bert Burns needed another singer. He found one in Detroit.
Irma Franklin was 23 years old in 1967. She had grown up singing gospel in her father’s church, Reverend CL Franklin’s New Bethl Baptist Church in Detroit, one of the most famous black churches in America. She had started singing professionally as a teenager. Her younger sister was Artha Franklin. This matters. This has always mattered.
Irma Franklin’s career existed in the shadow of her sisters from the beginning. Artha had released Respect in 1967, the year Irma was recording Peace of My Heart. Artha was becoming the queen of soul. Irma was talented, deeply talented, but the world had already decided which Franklin sister it was going to pay attention to.
Irma recorded Piece of My Heart in August 1967. Burns produced it. Her version was a soul song in the classic tradition warm controlled. The voice doing what trained gospel influenced singers do with emotion, which is contain it and release it in measured doses. It was beautiful. It was professional. It reached number 10 on the R&B chart.
It was her biggest hit. And then Bert Burns died. December 30, 1967. Bert Burns had a heart attack. He was 38 years old. He died without knowing that his song was about to become one of the most famous recordings in rock history. He died without hearing what Janice Joplain was going to do with the thing he had built.
The writer of Peace of My Heart never heard Janice Joplain sing it. This is one of the specific cruelties that history contains. the person who makes something not living to see what it becomes. Burns had tried to get the song to Van Morrison. Morrison had said no. Irma Franklin had recorded it and had a modest hit.
And then Burns was gone and the song existed in the world. And what happened next was not something he could have predicted. Big Brother and the Holding Company were recording Cheap Thrills in 1968. The album that would become their masterpiece. The album that would go to number one. the album with the RC crumb cover that everyone recognized.
Someone brought peace of my heart to the session. Janice heard it and she took it, not covered it. Took it. The way certain singers take a song and make the question of who wrote it feel almost irrelevant. Not through theft, but through transformation so complete that the song becomes a new thing.
Sam Andrews guitar in the Big Brother version is distorted and violent in a way that has nothing to do with Franklin’s soul arrangement. The tempo is different. The feeling is different. The voice is different in the most fundamental sense. Where Franklin controlled her emotion, Janice Joplain released hers without restraint, without safety, without the distance that performance usually provides.
The two versions of Peace of My Heart are so different that they might as well be different songs, which is exactly what Irma Franklin discovered. Irma Franklin was at home when she heard Janice Joplain’s version on the radio. She did not immediately recognize it. This is documented. She has said so.
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The song she had recorded, the song she knew from the inside, from the sessions with Bert Burns, from the specific way her voice had moved through those chord changes, came back to her from a radio speaker transformed beyond recognition. She had to listen for a while before she understood what she was hearing.
Her song returned to her as a different song. The specific experience of having your work transformed so completely that you become an audience for it. Cheap Thrills went to number one in August 1968. Piece of My Heart became one of the defining recordings of the era. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.
It was on Rolling Stones list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. It is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 songs that shaped rock and roll. Irma Franklin’s version is remembered by music historians and collectors. It is not what most people hear when they hear the song. She continued her career. She sang back up on some of Aretha’s recordings.
She ran a child care agency in Detroit called Boyville. She lived a full life that was not defined only by the shadow she lived under. She died of cancer in 2002. She was 63 years old. Her Grammy nomination for Piece of My Heart best female R&B vocal performance went to her sister Artha for Chain of Fools.
Even that final recognition was taken by the shadow. Here is what this story is actually about. It is about the chain of decisions and accidents and deaths that have to align for a great recording to exist. Van Morrison says no. Bert Burns finds Irma Franklin. Irma records the song and has a hit. Bert Burns dies.
The song exists in the world orphaned from its creator. Big Brother hears it. Janice claims it. The transformation happens. Remove one link from that chain and the song you know does not exist. If Van Morrison had said yes, he records it. No Irma version. Probably no Janice version.
If Bert Burns doesn’t find Irma, the song waits for someone else. Maybe it never reaches Janice. If Janice hears it and passes as Morrison passed, the song remains Irma’s modest hit and nothing more. Every great recording is a chain of accidents and choices that could have gone differently at any point.
Piece of my heart’s chain runs through a songwriter who died too young, a talented woman who never got the recognition she deserved, and a voice from Port Arthur, Texas that transformed a soul song into something that has been on the radio for 55 years. Irma Franklin recorded it first. She heard it come back to her unrecognizable.
The song outlived everyone who touched it. It is still playing. Subscribe.
