Janice Joplin Short Biography

Janice Joplin, a singer-songwriter and one of the biggest female rock stars of her time was born in Texas on January 19, 1943. Joplin was an American blues influenced rock singer and known for her powerful, blues-inspired distinctive vocals.
She grew up in a small Texas town, Port Arthur and it was known for its connections to the oil industry.
Joplin developed a love for music at a very young age and often sang in her local church choir. At a very young age, she showed promising signs of being a performer.
The small confining community of Arthur Texas became extremely difficult for Joplin to handle as she entered puberty and she desperately wanted to escape. She was quoted as saying she was a “misfit.” She attended Thomas Jefferson High School and started to rebel, became overweight and developed acne so bad that it left deep scars and later required surgery. The kids at school would call her names such as “pig”, “freak” and others. In this small community, it was known to be racist and Janice wasn’t so she wasn’t fitting into what the norm was in this school. Janice would try to be different, completely straying from the popular clothes styles and instead wearing her own styles. She liked to stand out from the crowd, and she became a big target of
I think to Janice this quote meant to don’t give in to the pressures of others, and to just be your own self. As an example, Janice was made fun of when she wore leggings with men’s shirts and created her own styles based on her personality. Janice struggled with fitting in, but she never comprised who she was, her beliefs or what she stood for. I think about reading about the small community being racist and Janice wasn’t and she was called very bad names for this, yet she never compromised who she was. To comprise herself in my opinion would have been to go with the “norm” giving up on who she felt she