It has come to my attention Jeanine Plumer, that some people believe the ghost of Janis Joplin is roaming in Austin, Texas.
As this question has been put to me by several different people, I will be addressing this in this blog.
Janis Joplin was in Austin for a fairly short amount of time during her relatively short career. She was born in Port Arthur on January 19, 1943. Her father, Seth Joplin, was a longtime resident of the Golf town, a cannery and refinery worker, and an operating engineer. Her mother, Dorothy, was a sturdy middle class housewife during the family’s early years and later was a registrar of a local business college. A younger sister named Laura and a brother named Michael were also in the family. From the book Legendary Ladies of Texas. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society. In cooperation with the Texas Foundation for Women’s Resources. This is a quote
“Nothing that I’ve heard or read about her family or the city serves to anticipate what Janus was like. In fact, little in her childhood seems to indicate the precociousness so often reported of legendary figures. But with puberty in adolescence, this changed in significant ways. She felt herself to be different, different from her family and from her peers. The story of the ugly duckling is suggested again and again by the facts of her early life, and a comma, of course, by the manner of much of the telling in the biographies and adoring obituaries. It is perhaps too easy, but I find this analogy compelling. Janus began to separate herself from her family. Whereas she had been a charming and loving daughter who had obvious intellectual ability and a flair for the esthetic, she became the wayward child”. Stanley G Alexander.
Janis Joplin’s career was really born in the San Francisco hippie scene. She moved back and forth between California and Texas for a few years. This is how she is remembered in the music scene that was emerging in Austin, Texas.
“But up to, and in fact, during the time when I knew her as, like me, a singer looking for an audience in Austin, she was still, despite the virulence of her rebellion, inside the parameters of the middle class life. She was going to college, first at Lamar State in Beaumont, then the University of Texas, and then again still later during a season of disappointment and aimlessness when she had come home from San Francisco, about 1964,, back at Lamar. That I knew her at all is a mini lesson in vagaries of history. Julie Paul was driving north on Rio Grande Street, bored as hell in her still almost New TR3, when she saw Janis and Powell St John and Lanny Wiggins walking along with musical instruments., Janice with the autoharp, Julie asked where they were going and they said to pick at a party. Julie went to their party with them and on the next Saturday night brought them to Kenneth Threadgill’s old converted filling station beer joint, where Bill Malone, Ed Malone, Ed Mellon, Willie Benson and I had the best gig for drinks that ever was.
Early recording of Janis Joplin
Thread Gills was perfect for such novices as we all were, especially at first, When families and friends, old, fans of Kenneth Threadgill‘s, and his neighborhood Saturday night crowd were our main audience. But with Janice’s performances, the crowds began to grow tremendously.
This was not simply the so-called ghetto bunch, friends with and strongly identified with Janus and anticipating the freaky decade to follow. Now there was a large sprinkling of ordinary university students, youngster Austinites, Threadgill’s old fans and our new ones, and by 1961, even fraternity and sorority types. There was an excitement that was new, that would now perhaps be identified by the word energy, and most of this was focused on Janis. The old filling station and beer joint soon was too small for the tremendous crowds.”
“Reminiscing in 1968 with a writer for Ramparts, she had long since dropped the Austin identity she once had for us.
I went to California at a very young and at a fucked-up stage, about 18. I used to sing in a little bar outside of Austin, Texas called Threadgill ‘s. Fantastic bar. All kinds of hillbillies come in every Saturday night, and everybody brings their guitars and sits around a big wooden table and drinks free beer and plays. I sang Rosie Maddox songs. But I didn’t really sing hard until I got with this band”.
So now I really don’t think there is a ghost of Janis Joplin in or around Austin. TX. Austin was just a stop along the way to her great success. Granted, short lived.
The hotel room where she died in Los Angeles is a place of fasination and “go to” ghost investigating for the ghost people. Now the Highland Gardens Hotel.
