December 21st, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee, Mid-South Coliseum, the Stax Volt Yuletide Thing, the annual Christmas party of the greatest soul record label in America. On the bill, the Bar-Kays, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Albert King, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, William Bell and Eddie Floyd, and Janis Joplin.
It was her first solo show ever. She had been with Big Brother and the Holding Company for 2 years. She had left them 20 days earlier. She had assembled a new band in 3 weeks, and her first performance as a solo artist was at a Stax Records Christmas party in Memphis, Tennessee, with the actual legends of American soul music.
This is the story of that night. To understand what December 21st, 1968 meant, you have to understand two things simultaneously. You have to understand what Stax Records was, and you have to understand what Janis Joplin’s relationship to that world was. Stax Records was founded in Memphis in 1957. By 1968, it was the defining force in American soul music, the label that had given the world Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Carla Thomas, Booker T. and the M.G.
‘s, Albert King, Isaac Hayes. The sound that came out of the studio on McLemore Avenue was not like anything being made anywhere else. It was raw, direct, built from the Memphis tradition of gospel and blues, played by musicians who had grown up in the same streets. The Stax Christmas party, the Yuletide Thing, was a celebration of that world, an annual gathering of the Stax family and the Memphis audience that had made them.
It was not a concert designed for the wider world. It was a homecoming, and Janis Joplin was on the bill. This was not an accident. It was a statement about what she was trying to become. She had left Big Brother and the Holding Company on December 1st, 1968, 20 days before the Memphis show. The reason she left was documented in everything she said about it at the time. She wanted horns.
She wanted to move in the direction of the music she had always loved most, not rock, soul. The Stax world, the Memphis world. Otis Redding and Albert King and the sound of the South applied to a voice that had been building toward it since Port Arthur. She had grown up listening to Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton.
She had found the blues before she found rock. When she stood on stage at Monterey in 1967 and stopped the world with Ball and Chain, she was not inventing a sound. She was delivering a love letter to a tradition she had been studying for 10 years. The Stax Christmas show was the most direct expression of that love she had ever attempted.
She was going to stand on a Stax stage in Memphis in front of a Memphis audience and sing the music she had learned from records in Port Arthur, Texas. The 20 days between Big Brother and Memphis were chaos. Mike Bloomfield, one of the great guitarists of the era, and Nick Gravenites helped assemble the new band. Bloomfield had his own projects and would not stay, but his presence in the early rehearsals helped give the band its direction.
The musicians gathered in San Francisco in mid-December. A horn section, a new rhythm section, players from the Bay Area session world who could handle the soul direction she wanted. They had 3 weeks to become a band. On December 20, the day before the show, they rehearsed at Stax Studio B in Memphis.
Stax Studio B, the room where Otis Redding had recorded, the room where “Hold On, I’m Comin'” and “Soul Man” and “Green Onions” had been made, the room that had shaped the sound of American music for a decade. She rehearsed her new band in that room. If she felt the weight of that, she did not say so in ways that have been documented.
What has been documented is that she was prepared. She knew what she was doing. She was going to Memphis to show that she belonged in that conversation. The show on December 21 was the second annual Stax Yuletide thing. The audience was the Memphis soul audience, the people who had grown up with this music, who went to Stax shows the way other people went to church.
They knew every act on the bill. They had heard Booker T. play organ since they were children. They had danced to Rufus Thomas. They had cried at Albert King’s guitar. They did not know what to make of Janis Joplin, a white woman from Texas on a Stax stage in Memphis in 1968.
The specific context of race and music in 1968 America was not simple. The Stax world was not hostile to white musicians. Booker T. and the M.G.’s was famously integrated with white guitarist Steve Cropper and white bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn. The music had always crossed lines, but this was different. This was not a session musician.
This was a white woman from Texas presenting herself as an inheritor of the tradition. The Memphis audience watched her walk onto the stage, and then she opened her mouth. She sang “To Love Somebody.” The Bee Gees had written it in 1967. They had written it for a specific person. They had written it for Otis Redding, the Memphis soul singer, who had been at the top of the world at that moment, whose voice they had heard and loved and wanted to have sing their song. Otis Redding never recorded it.
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He died on December 10th, 1967, 1 year and 11 days before Janis Joplin stood on a Memphis stage and sang it. She was singing a song written for a Memphis legend in Memphis 1 year after his death on a Stax stage. The specific weight of that moment, whether the Memphis audience felt it explicitly or simply felt something, is not fully documented.
What is documented is that she sang it and that she had been performing it since that night. It would appear on her next album. It would become one of the songs that defined what she was trying to do with the Cosmic Blues Band. She sang it first in Memphis for the Stax audience in the city where it should have been sung. What did the Memphis audience make of her? The specific accounts are limited.
The night has been documented in photographs, Don Paulson’s photographs of Janis backstage with the Stax musicians, of her on the stage, of her in the Mid-South Coliseum, but the detailed audience reaction has not been preserved in the way that Monterey was preserved. What we know from the broader story is this.
The Memphis audience that night was not encountering Janis Joplin as the world was encountering her, as a rock star, as a countercultural figure, as the woman who had stopped the world at Monterey. They were encountering her as a singer who claimed to love the music they loved and who was standing in their city on their label’s stage making that claim with her voice.
That is the most direct version of the claim any musician can make. She did not send a representative. She came herself. The Cosmic Blues Band that performed in Memphis on December 21st, 1968 was not the band it would eventually become. Three weeks of rehearsal is not enough to build the kind of musical unity that soul music requires.
The reviews of the band’s early performances, including Memphis, noted that the horns were sometimes fighting her voice rather than supporting it. Critics were not uniformly kind. She knew this. She worked on it through 1969. The band evolved. By the time she appeared at Woodstock in August 1969, she had been developing the sound for 8 months. But Memphis was the beginning.
Memphis was the night she stood in the room where the music she had loved all her life was made and said, “I am here. This is what I am. This is the direction I am going.” She chose to make that statement in Memphis, in front of a Stax audience, on a bill with Booker T and Albert King.
That choice tells you everything about what mattered to her. The photographs from that night show her backstage with the Stax musicians. The specific ease of those photographs, the specific quality of someone comfortable in the room they are in, tells you something. She was not a tourist in that world. She was not appropriating something she didn’t understand.
She was a woman who had grown up loving this music, who had been building toward this moment for 10 years, who had finally gotten herself to the place where the music came from. And she sang in Memphis, on a Stax stage. Her first solo show, December 21st, 1968. Almost nobody talks about this night. The histories go from Big Brother to Cosmic Blues without stopping here.
The documentaries skip from Monterey to Woodstock. The Memphis show is a footnote, but it was the night she declared what she was trying to be. Not a rock star, a soul singer. A woman who had listened to Bessie Smith in Port Arthur and Otis Redding on the radio and had decided that this was the tradition she belonged to, however unlikely that belonging appeared from the outside.
She went to Memphis to make the argument with her voice in the city that could judge it most accurately, on the stage that mattered most, her first night alone. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
