"Between Houston and New Orleans, there were a lot of clubs that gave a home to traveling musicians." Among the mentors she adopted were Nina Simone, Etta James, Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin. When Janis was a teenager, Laura added, she'd often travel to Louisiana to take in the musical acts. "That group was very serious about music," she said. That, according to Laura, came from Janis's friends, who were into roots music. "I remember thinking, 'Music can do that to you!' I think Janis got that just as much as I did."Ī third influence came from outside: the blues. "He'd bring us in to listen to certain passages." Michael recalled his father sitting quietly and intently in a corner, absorbing a piece of Rachmaninoff. "My father was a serious classical music listener," said Laura. Her mother provided one avenue of schooling, her father another. Janis Joplin's musical upbringing began at home. "We want people to remember why Janis became well known," echoed Michael. To celebrate the talent and ability of a singer is a great compliment." So often stories about women get sidelined in favor of private details. "It's appropriate that a woman has her work as the focus. "He had the idea looking at how she interpreted the artists who influenced her into her own style," explained Laura. When they met Randy Johnson, A Night with Janis Joplin's director, who conceived of the project, the Joplins knew they had found the right project, one that wouldn't exploit the more lurid aspects of the life of their sister, who famously died of a drug overdose in 1970 at the age of 27. "We've been talking about doing a theatrical production for a while" about Janis, said Laura. To the Joplins' way of thinking, theatre music was just one of many musical influences that formed the distinctive vocal style of their celebrated sister, and each one of those wellsprings will be explored in the new Broadway biographical musical, A Night With Janis Joplin, opening Oct. "I really didn't understand how much it affected me until I went on a date with my wife to a 'West Side Story' sing-along," added Michael. "We those LPs around the home and listened to them a lot. "Our mother, in an earlier life, was a Broadway singer," said Laura Joplin, the third Joplin sibling. "My mom would set it up to do house cleaning and we would do Broadway show tunes," recalled Michael Joplin, brother of the late rock and roll icon Janis Joplin. By the time Joplin was in his teens, in the 1880s, he was making a living as an itinerant musician, shaping a brand new American sound.At the Joplin house, the kids looked forward to cleaning day. A natural-born musician, Joplin absorbed a wide mix of influences, from the plantation melodies his parents played on the violin and banjo to the classical training he received from a generous local piano teacher. He was born in northeast Texas just four years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the first Black Americans born into the promise of freedom. His short life (he died before age 50 in 1917) is almost a case study in the transformations of his time. Leaving his own indelible mark on the 20th century, Joplin was an innovator whose deceptive, irregular rhythms and nuanced harmonic language helped define the trajectory of American music during a time of rapid change and flux. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/New York Public Library Female dancer in flowered dress (1935-1943)
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