Tina Turner told Janice Joplain something that nobody else told her. She said, “Honey, you can’t continue to sing like that or you’ll have no voice.” She said it directly. She said it from experience. She said it because she had been a professional singer since she was a teenager and she could hear exactly what was happening to Janice Joplain’s instrument. Janice didn’t listen.
or rather she heard it, she understood it and she continued anyway because the singing she was doing was not a technique she could modify. It was the only way she knew how to do it. This is the story of that warning and what it tells us about two of the most important voices of the 20th century.
By 1968, Tina Turner had been a professional performer for a decade. She had been singing since she was a teenager in Nutbush, Tennessee. Had joined Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, had developed one of the most physically total performance styles anyone had ever seen on a stage. She sang and she danced, and she commanded every room she entered, and she had been doing it long enough to understand the specific economics of a voice, what it costs to use it the way she used it, what it requires to sustain that use across years and decades. She had technique. She had control. She had developed the specific wisdom of someone who treats their instrument with enough respect to protect it while also demanding everything from it. Janice Joplain had none of that. Not because she was careless, because she was constitutionally unable to manage what came out of her. The voice was connected
to something she didn’t manage. The specific raw emotional truth that made her extraordinary was also the thing that consumed the instrument. When Tina Turner first heard Janice Joplain sing, she heard both things simultaneously, the extraordinary quality and the cost. Film director Michael Wadley was there when they first met.
Wadley would go on to direct Woodstock, the documentary that captured the festival that preserved the performances of both Tina Turner and Janice Joplain for history. He was already in that world in the late 1960s, moving between artists, watching everything. And he was present when Tina Turner heard Janice Joplain for the first time. He described what happened.
Tina said to Janice, “Honey, you can’t continue to sing like that or you’ll have no voice.” Five words of diagnosis from one professional singer to another. You can’t continue to sing like that. She wasn’t wrong. She was completely technically experientially right. The question was whether being right could change anything.
Janice Joplain had built everything on a voice that she didn’t protect. The specific quality that stopped rooms, the roughness, the rawness, the sound of a voice that is giving everything without reserve was inseparable from the absence of protection. You cannot have one without the other. She didn’t hold back. She didn’t save anything for the next show.
She spent everything every night because spending everything was the only version of the thing she knew how to do. A more technically managed version of her voice would have been a different voice. A voice that lasted longer. A voice that might still be recording in 1985, in 1990, in 2000. But not that voice.
Not the one that made 7,000 people go silent at Mterrey. Not the one that Albert King called the queen. Not the one that Tina Turner heard and recognized as extraordinary even as she recognized its cost. Tina said, “You can’t continue to sing like that.” She was right. But the only alternative was to sing like something else.
And Janice Joplain was not something else. On July 18th, 1969, Janice appeared on the Dick Kat show. Cavitt asked her, “Who do you go to see when you want to see a really good concert?” Her answer was immediate. Tina Turner. Fantastic singer, fantastic dancer, fantastic show. Cavitt admitted he didn’t know who Tina Turner was.
This was not unusual. In 1969, Ike and Tina were still largely unknown to white America. They had been touring and recording for over a decade and had a massive following among black audiences. But the mainstream crossover had not yet happened. Janice Joplain knew who Tina Turner was.
She had been watching her for years, going to shows whenever she could, sitting in the audience and watching the person she considered the best performer alive do what she did. She had received a warning from Tina about her voice. She called her the best chick ever on national television. Both things were true.
The admiration was real. The warning was real. The inability to change was also real. The comparison between their two approaches to a voice is one of the most instructive in music history. Tina Turner performed with total physical commitment and sustained that commitment across 50 years. Her voice in the 1980s, the comeback era private dancer, What’s Love Got to Do With It was the same instrument she had been developing since the 1950s, modified by age, deepened by experience, but the same voice still there, still capable of commanding rooms. She achieved this through discipline, through technique, through treating her instrument with enough respect to protect it even while demanding everything from it. Through not doing what Janice Joplain did, Janice Joplain performed with total emotional commitment and sustained that commitment for every performance she
ever gave. The voice on Pearl, recorded in 1970, is audibly different from the voice on Big Brother’s first recordings from 1966 and 1967. Rougher, more worn, more obviously expensive, but also more precise, more controlled in a specific way. Not the technical control that Tina had, but something else.
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the control of someone who has been doing the most difficult thing for four years and has learned where the edges are. She had maybe five years in her at the pace she was going, possibly 10 if she had changed something. She had four. In the last week of her life, she went to watch Tina Turner perform at the Hungry Eye in San Francisco. She went every night.
Tina found out years later in 2000 in a radio interview when someone mentioned that Janice had spent her final week at the Hungry Eye watching the show. Tina’s response was immediate and simple. She was a real fan. She was a real fan. The woman who had warned her. The performer she had called the best chick ever.
The voice she kept returning to. She spent the last week of her life watching Tina Turner perform. She was a real fan to the end. Tina Turner died on May 24th, 2023. She was 83 years old. She outlived Janice Joplain by 53 years. Those 53 years were made possible in part by the very thing she had tried to give Janice.
The specific wisdom that a voice is an instrument, and instruments require care. Janice knew. She heard the warning. She understood it. She couldn’t be anything other than what she was. And what she was lasted four years at full intensity and produced some of the most honest music anyone has ever recorded.
Tina was right. And Janice was also right. Two kinds of right. Two kinds of voice. Both of them now gone. Both of them permanent. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
