Janis Lyn Joplin

The Handbook of Texas places the roots of her sound in her junior year at Jefferson High, when she joined a group of beatniks who explored the region's nightspots and absorbed its many musical styles. Texas Highways adds that she lived at 4330 32nd Street from age four to eighteen, and found she could belt after listening to Bessie Smith around sixteen. Classmates often rejected her, the Handbook says. At her August 1970 class reunion she left feeling more alienated from the town, and she was dead two months later.

What the plaque says

Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 - October 4, 1970) A native of Port Arthur, famed blues and rock and roll singer Janis Joplin lived here with her family. She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960 and attended Port Arthur College and Lamar State College of Technology (Lamar University) in Beaumont. A liberal and outspoken free spirit, Janis rebelled against the conservatism of her hometown, and in 1962 she moved to Austin to study art at the University of Texas. She connected to the burgeoning Austin music scene and began singing in clubs around town, most notably at Threadgill's, a bar operated by Texas country singer and yodeler Kenneth Threadgill. With her raw and raspy singing style exhibiting the blues, jazz, country, cajun, gospel and soul music influences of east Texas and Louisiana, she was a popular local performer. Searching for wider acceptance, Joplin moved to San Francisco in 1963 and quickly became part of the growing folk music and counter-culture movement of the 1960s. Her performances at the 1967 International Pop and Jazz Festivals in Monterey brought her widespread recognition. Her first album, Cheap Thrills, with the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, was a wild success even as her personal life became marred with alcohol and drug abuse. Later recording with the Kosmic Blues Band and the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, she was an international sensation by the end of the decade. In August 1970, at the height of her fame, Joplin returned to Port Arthur for her ten-year high school reunion. Just two months later, she died of an accidental overdose of heroin and alcohol; her ashes were spread along the coast of northern California. Her final album, Pearl, released after her death, earned a gold record. (2007)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Museum of the Gulf Coast — 3.6 mi
  Port Arthur's regional museum in a former bank building: fossils, Native Americans, the petroleum story, a 125-foot history mural and Halls of Fame for musicians, athletes and artists.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 12 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.
• Sabine Pass Battleground State Historic Site — 14 mi
  A waterfront park at the mouth of the Sabine where the earthwork of Fort Griffin stood, with a Dowling statue, a Union memorial, wartime magazines and a walkway for fishing.
• McFaddin-Ward House — 16 mi
  A Beaux-Arts Colonial Revival mansion finished in 1906 and lived in by one family for 75 years, with free guided tours of three furnished floors, the carriage house and gardens.

More markers nearby

• The Hughen School — 0.7 mi
• Harry Henry Choates — 0.8 mi
• Central Baptist Church — 1.2 mi
• Trinity Lutheran Church — 1.4 mi