Most people who know Crybaby know Janice Joplain’s version, the ragged blues rock voice, the full tilt boogie band, the specific pain of the pearl recording. They know it from the radio, from the album, from the way it hits. What most people don’t know is that in 1963, 7 years before Janice recorded it, a gospel singer named Garnet Mims took the same song to number one, and almost no one remembers.
This is the story of Crybaby, both versions. And the man who wrote it, who never heard either one of Janice Joplain’s greatest recordings because he was already gone. Gara Mims grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, the son of a preacher. He learned to sing in church. That is where the tradition came from.
The specific gospel power, the call and response, the voice that carries the congregation somewhere it could not get to alone. He sang in the church before he sang anywhere else. And when he moved to Philadelphia and started singing secular music, he brought the church with him. This is the specific thing about Garnet Mims that matters for this story.
His voice was a gospel voice applied to soul music. The sacred and the secular sharing the same throat. The fire and brimstone ecstasies of the black sanctified church, as one music historian described it, coming through a song about heartbreak. In 1963, songwriter and producer Jerry Ragavoy brought Mims into the studio with Bert Burns.
Burns and Ragavoy were one of the most potent songwriting partnerships of the era. Together, they had a gift for the song that sits exactly at the intersection of gospel and blues and pop. the song that feels like church and heartbreak at the same time. Their instinct was for the specific emotional note that could carry a voice like Garner Mimses to the furthest possible reach.
They had written a song called Crybaby. They brought Mims into the studio and put him in front of a microphone. Behind him, providing backing vocals, Houston and the Sweet Inspirations. Houston, who would later become known as Whitney Houston’s mother, was one of the great backing vocalists of the era. The Sweet Inspirations backed everyone who mattered.
And here they were behind Garnet Mims on a Tuesday in 1963 singing Crybaby. When the session was done, what they had was something that one music historian called the first shots in the soul music revolution. The song went to number one on the R&B chart. number four on the Billboard pop chart. Garnet Mims had his moment and Janice Joplain, 20 years old in Port Arthur, Texas, heard it on the radio.
Now, I need to tell you about Bert Burns because he is the invisible thread running through two of Janice Joplain’s most important recordings. Bert Burns wrote Crybaby with Jerry Ragavoy in 1963. The song Garnet Mims took to number one. Bert Burns also wrote Piece of My Heart with Jerry Ragavoy in 1967.
The song Air Franklin recorded first before Janice transformed it on Cheap Thrills. Two songs, the same songwriting team, both recorded first by black artists who never got the recognition they deserved. Both later transformed by Janice Joplain into something that the world came to think of as hers.
Bert Burns died on December 35th, 1967. He was 38 years old. He did not live to hear Janice Joplain record Piece of My Heart. He did not live to hear her record Crybaby. The songwriter who gave her two of her greatest recordings never knew she was going to make them. He wrote the songs. She found them.
He was gone before the finding happened. That is the specific cruelty of timing that this story keeps returning to. Janice had been performing Crybaby in her live sets for years before she recorded it for Pearl. The song had been in her repertoire since the late60s, one of the songs she came back to.
One of the songs that fit the specific space in her voice where pain and power were the same thing. When she took it into Sunset Sound in 1970 for the Pearl Sessions, she had been living with the song for years. What she did to it was what she always did. She did not cover it. She claimed it.
The Garnet Mims original is a gospel production. The church underneath every note. Houston lifting the song towards something sacred. It is beautiful. It is specific. It belongs to the tradition that made it. Janice’s version is blues rock, roarer, more personal. The full tilt boogie band beneath her, Paul Rothschild producing and her voice, the voice that had been built from Port Arthur to San Francisco to Mterrey to hear, applying itself to the same structure and producing something completely different. Both versions are true. They just tell different truths. Mims’s version says, “Here is the shape of a wound presented with the beauty and the order of the church.” Joplain’s version says, “Here is the wound itself, unbeautified, unordered. Here, Pearl was released in January 1971, 3 months after Janice Joplain’s death.
Crybaby was released as a single with MercedesBenz as the B-side and spent six weeks on the charts. The song that Garnet Mims had taken to number one in 1963 re-entered the cultural consciousness in a different form under a different name. His gospel soul version and her blues rock version the same architecture entirely different rooms and slowly over the years and decades that followed the association shifted.
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When people heard Crybaby they heard her, not him. Garnet Mims is still with us. He has given interviews over the years. He has been asked about Crybaby. He has been gracious about it. The kind of grace that comes from someone who has been in the music long enough to understand that this is how it goes. Songs travel.
Voices carry them. The original is not always the one that lasts. He put Crybaby to number one in 1963, backed by Houston and the Sweet Inspirations in a production that one music historian said fired the first shots in the soul music revolution. That was real. That happened. That matters.
And Janice Joplain heard it on a Texas radio in 1963 and carried it inside her for seven years until she stood in a Hollywood recording studio in 1970 and made it bleed in a different way. That was also real. That also happened. That also matters. The specific thing about Janice Joplain and the songs she covered is that she never diluted them.
She took the songs that came from the black gospel and soul tradition, the tradition she had been absorbing since Port Arthur, the music she had learned from records in her bedroom and jukeboxes in bars and the radio coming through Texas windows, and she did not whitewash them. She did not sand the edges.
She did not make them more comfortable for a white rock audience. She went deeper. the specific rawness of her crybaby, the specific absence of the gospel order that makes Mims’s version so controlled and so beautiful. It is not a failure to honor the tradition. It is a different answer to the same question.
What does it sound like when the wound is completely unmanaged? When there is no church to hold it in shape, when it is just the pain directly? Garnet Mims gave us one answer. Janice Joplain gave us another. The song was big enough for both. Bert Burns wrote the structure. Garnet Mims showed it was a hit. Houston lifted it toward the sacred and Janice Joplain took it somewhere else entirely.
The man who wrote it never heard her. The man who first recorded it has watched his version fade from memory while hers remains. And the woman who recorded the version that lasted died at 27, 3 months before the recording was released. All of them inside one song. Crybaby. The Garnet Mim’s original is worth your time.
Put it on after you hear hers. Hear what he built. Hear what she did with it. Hear Bert Burns’s structure holding them both. Two versions, one truth. All of it worth remembering. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
