I have been singing professionally for 55 years. Jazz mostly, standards, some original work. I’ve taught at two universities. I’ve recorded 11 albums. I have stood on stages in New York and Chicago and London and Tokyo. None of that would have happened. In the spring of 1969, I had made a decision, a final decision.
I was going to stop singing. I had told my husband. I had already begun thinking about what came next. Six weeks later, at a gathering in New York, I sat in a corner with Janice Joplain for 45 minutes. She didn’t know I had decided to quit. I didn’t tell her. But something she said that night changed every decision I made for the next 55 years.
She has been gone since 1970. She never knew what she did for me. I want to tell you she grew up in Harlem. She had been singing since she was seven years old. Church first, then school, then the specific New York jazz world that existed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The world of small clubs and serious musicians and the unspoken agreement that what was happening in those rooms mattered. She was good.
She knew she was good. The people who heard her knew she was good. She had a voice that did what a great jazz voice does. It made the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It took a standard that everyone in the room knew and found something in it that nobody had found before.
She recorded her first album in 1964. It got good reviews. The label wanted a second. And then the world changed. Between 1964 and 1969, the music industry transformed in ways that nobody fully predicted and nobody fully controlled. Rock and roll became rock. The Beatles changed everything. Mottown changed everything. The folk revival changed everything. and jazz.
The tradition she had given her life to. The tradition that Nenah Simone and Miles Davis and the figures on her wall represented. Jazz got pushed to the side. Not eliminated. Never eliminated. But the venues got smaller. The record labels got less interested. The cultural oxygen that had sustained the jazz world for 30 years went somewhere else.
By 1969, she was performing for rooms that were half the size of the rooms she had performed for in 1965. Her second album had not found the audience the first one had. The label had let her go. She was teaching voice lessons to pay rent. She was 28 years old. She had been doing this for 10 years.
She had given everything she had, and the world had received it politely and moved on. In the spring of 1969, she made the decision. She told her husband, “I’m done. I’ll teach. I’ll find something else, but I’m done performing.” He listened. He didn’t argue. He knew she had been building toward this for a year. The decision was made.
Six weeks later, a friend called. There was a gathering. musicians, artists, the specific mix of people that New York produced in 1969. People in various states of fame and obscurity gathered in someone’s apartment or loft, the kind of evening that happened regularly in that world. She almost didn’t go.
She had already in her mind begun to separate from this world. the world of musicians and gatherings and the specific hope that something might happen, someone might hear you. Tonight might be different from last night. She had given that hope up. But she went and at the gathering someone introduced her to Janice Joplain.
Janice Joplain in 1969 was the most famous female rock singer in America. Cheap Thrills had gone to number one the previous summer. I got them old cosmic blues again. Mama had just been released. She was on magazine covers. She was in the newspapers. She was the voice that had stopped the world at Mterrey two years earlier and had not stopped since.
And she was standing in someone’s apartment in New York, southern comfort in hand, with the specific quality she always had in rooms, completely present, completely herself, not performing fame, but simply being the person she was at that level of recognition. The introduction was brief, mutual friend, two names, two handshakes. She remembers Janice looking at her directly, not the celebrity look, the appraisal, the honest taking in of another person.
She said, “You’re a singer.” It wasn’t a question. She said, “Yes.” Janice said, “What kind?” “Jazz standards mostly.” Janice said, “I love that. I grew up on Bessie Smith and Billy Holiday. Come sit down.” They sat in a corner away from the main gathering and they talked. Janice asked questions the way she always asked questions directly without the social padding that most people used to soften inquiry.
She wanted to know what clubs was she performing in? What was she working on? What was the scene like for jazz right now in New York? She answered honestly. smaller venues, less interest from labels, the world moving in other directions. Janice nodded. She said, “Rock is doing the same thing to itself right now that you’re describing.
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Everybody chasing the same thing, the real stuff getting harder to sustain.” They talked about music for a long time. About what made a performance real versus what made it technically correct. about the difference between singing a song and inhabiting it. At some point, she doesn’t remember exactly how it came up, only that it came up naturally.
The way things come up when a conversation is genuinely honest. She found herself saying it. I’m thinking about stopping. I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and I don’t know if I have it in me to keep going. Janice didn’t respond immediately. She sat down her drink. She looked at her directly. She said, “Can I ask you something? When you sing, not performing, not for an audience, just singing alone in a room, do you still feel it?” She thought about it honestly. She said, “Yes.
” Janice said, “Then it’s not done with you.” She said, “But the industry.” Janice said, “I’m not talking about the industry. I’m talking about the thing, the reason you started, the thing that happens when you open your mouth and something comes out that you didn’t plan. And it’s more true than anything you could have planned.
She said, “Yes, that still happens.” Janice said, “Then you don’t get to quit. That thing doesn’t care what the industry is doing. It doesn’t care about the clubs getting smaller or the labels losing interest. It needs you to keep going because it has nowhere else to go. She says, “I’ve heard a lot of advice in 55 years from mentors, from teachers, from people who knew more than I did about the business and the craft.
What Janice said that night was not advice. It was a statement of fact from someone who understood the thing from the inside. someone who had also tried to walk away from it, who had gone back to Port Arthur and tried to be ordinary and had discovered that the thing doesn’t release you just because you decide you’re done.
The thing needs you to keep going because it has nowhere else to go. She sat with that for a moment. Then she said, “I needed to hear that.” Janice said, “I needed to hear it, too. A few years back, somebody had to tell me. Now I’m telling you. They talked for another hour about Bessie Smith, about what it meant to carry a tradition forward, about what you owe to the music and what the music owes to you.
Janice talked about Big Mama Thornton and what she had learned from her records, about the specific quality of a voice that has been through real things and is reporting from inside them rather than performing about them from a safe distance. She said, “The reason I keep going back out there, even when it’s killing me, is because I don’t know how to be dishonest with an audience.
I can be dishonest with everybody else. I can manage my image and say the right things in interviews and do all of that, but when I’m on a stage with a microphone, I can’t lie. I never figured out how. And so, I have to keep going because it’s the only place where I’m completely true.” She listened.
She thought that is what I am afraid of losing. Not the career, not the recognition, the place where I am completely true. She left the gathering and walked home through New York. She did not call her husband that night to tell him her decision had changed. She wasn’t ready to say it out loud, but she knew she was not going to quit.
The thing still had somewhere to go. In October 1970, Janice Joplain died. She was 27 years old. She heard the news on the radio in her apartment. She sat for a long time. She thought she never knew. I never told her. She sat in that corner with me for 45 minutes and she said the thing that kept me in music and she went away and died six months later.
And she never knew what she had done. She went to the piano. She played for an hour. Standards mostly, the ones she had been singing since she was a child. She did not quit then. She has not quit since. 55 years, 11 albums, two universities, stages in four countries, hundreds of students who learned to sing from someone who almost stopped singing in the spring of 1969.
She teaches her students the same thing Janice told her, though she does not always attribute it. She says, “When you sing alone in a room and you still feel it, that’s not a feeling. That’s a direction. Follow it.” She says, “The thing doesn’t care what the industry is doing. It needs you to keep going because it has nowhere else to go.
” She never told Janice Joplain what that conversation meant. She never got to. Janice Joplain sat in a corner at a party in New York in 1969 and talked to a jazz singer she had just met for 45 minutes and said the thing the jazz singer needed to hear and then went back to being the most famous female rock singer in America. She never knew.
But 55 years later, a 73year-old woman is still singing. And now you know why. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
