She was a rock & roll woman to her toes, a blues singer of unparalleled passion and the greatest white female performer to emerge from the tempest of the late 1960s.

Janis Joplin shot out of Port Arthur, Texas, and blasted west to San Francisco during one of the most creative periods in this country’s cultural history, when an amplified music rose up from a boundless love for the blues and brought to flower a prideful, inspired, authentic American art form.

Driven by the music, Janis Joplin, more than any performer of her day, symbolized the mood of the decade that molded her genius; out of its theatricalities, its eye-popping colors, its peaks, its overdrive sex, it’s impatience, its excitements and its dangers, she made of herself a complete and darling original.