Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin (nicknamed 'Pearl') sang the blues like no other white woman before or since. Janis came from Port Arthur, Texas, and moved to San Francisco in 1966. In the same year she became a member of Big Brother and The Holding Company, and was a sensation at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

At 24 she was an overnight success. Big Brother signed with Bob Dylan's manager Albert Grossman. Their first major label album, Cheap Thrills, was a US Number 1. But in September 1968, Janis Joplin announced she was leaving Big Brother and The Holding Company, explaining that she and the band weren't "growing together anymore". She formed her own band called Full Tilt Boogie but Janis was slipping - undone by heavy drug use. Only after a weak performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 did she recognize her own failings and vow to kick her heroin habit.

Spring 1970 saw Janis clean and rejuvenated. In September she began recording her new album at Sunset Sound studios in LA. But when her boyfriend, a former drug dealer, left town for a few days, Janis grew bored and began using heroin again. Unknown to her, the last batch she procured was uncut, and America's most popular white blues singer died of an accidental heroin overdose on October 4, 1970, in a room at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles. She was the same age as Jimi Hendrix who had died three weeks earlier - only 27.

Pearl was released four months after Joplin's death and topped the American chart for nine weeks. And although she wasn't around to complete it, the album remains her definitive work.

Before Janis, the female rock star simply did not exist. There were glamorous soul queens like Diana Ross, and poised folk artists like Joni Mitchell, and numerous pretty pop stars. But Rock & Roll remained exclusively a boys' club. Janis broke the club rules.

Ultimately, Janis Joplin left behind a slim body of work but a powerful legacy. For the true measure of her influence look to Patti Smith, Alanis Morissette, Polly Harvey and The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde, who was 18 when she saw Janis perform live in Ohio, and later remarked: "It was like watching a boxing match". Such was the intensity of Janis Joplin's short life.