Rolling Stone Called Janis Joplin the Best Female Voice of Her Generation She Said Aretha Was Better D

January 31st, 1968, San Francisco. Janis Joplin sat down and wrote a letter to her parents in Port Arthur. She wrote about a lot of things, the band, the city, the people she had met, and then she wrote this, “Thanks for the article on Aretha. She is by far and away the best thing in music right now.

” Then she added something that tells you everything about who Janis Joplin was when she was being honest. “Although a review in Rolling Stone called me possibly the best female voice of her generation, but I suppose she and I are of different generations. She was 24 years old.” Rolling Stone had just called her possibly the best female voice of her generation.

And she sat down and wrote home to her parents to say, “Yes, but Aretha Franklin is better.” This is the story of what Aretha meant to Janis, and of a connection between two voices that most people have never noticed. Janis Joplin talked about Aretha Franklin the way religious people talk about scripture.

With reverence, with the specific humility of someone who has encountered something beyond their current capacity. She said it in interviews, she said it in letters, she said it on stage sometimes when she was introducing a cover version and wanted the audience to understand where it came from.

The most complete version of what she said was this, “Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, they are so subtle. They could milk you with two notes. They could go no farther than from an A to a B, and they could make you feel like they told you the whole universe. And Otis, my man, I think maybe if I keep singing, maybe I’ll get it.

Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I’ll get it.” That sentence from the woman who had just been called possibly the best female voice of her generation. She was telling you what she was reaching for, the thing just beyond her current grasp. The subtlety, the ability to say the whole universe with two notes, that she had not yet found but was spending her life trying to find. She had the power.

Aretha had the power and the subtlety. Janis could hear the difference. She wanted both. Here is where the story gets complicated. In 1968, Janis Joplin recorded Piece of My Heart for the Cheap Thrills album. It became one of the defining songs of her career, the song people still know, the song that still plays on classic rock radio, the song that young people discover and bring back as a rediscovery.

What most people don’t know is that Piece of My Heart was written for and first recorded by Irma Franklin. Irma Franklin, the elder sister of Aretha Franklin. Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Berns wrote the song in 1967 and gave it to Irma. Her recording was released as a single. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance.

Then Janis Joplin covered it. Her version, raw, powerful, the Big Brother wall of sound behind her, became the one that would outlast all the others. At the Grammy ceremony in 1969, the award for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance was announced. The nominees included Irma Franklin for Piece of My Heart.

The award went to Aretha Franklin for Chain of Fools. The sister whose song Janis had covered lost the award to the other sister, the one whose voice Janis called the whole universe. Nobody planned this chain of events. It assembled itself out of the ordinary machinery of the music business. Who writes what, who records it, who covers it, who wins the awards.

But the chain is there. Janis covered Irma’s song. Irma lost Grammy, Aretha won it, and Aretha was the voice Janis had said was better than her own. Aretha Franklin was born in 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee. She grew up in Detroit. Her father was C.L. Franklin, one of the most famous Baptist ministers in America, the man whose sermons were recorded on vinyl and sold nationally.

The Franklin household was a gathering place for every significant black musician of the 1950s. Mahalia Jackson came for dinner. Dinah Washington came. Sam Cooke, Clara Ward. Aretha absorbed all of them. She recorded her first album for Columbia in 1961 at the age of 18. Columbia tried to make her a pop singer, a jazz singer, a mainstream crossover artist.

None of it worked. Then she signed with Atlantic Records in 1967. Jerry Wexler flew her to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He put her in a room with a piano and a rhythm section and told her to sing what she felt. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You came out in February 1967. Respect came out in April 1967.

Aretha Franklin became Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin, 3,000 mi away in San Francisco, heard it and understood immediately that something had happened in music that she needed to study for the rest of her life. The two notes question Janis was describing when she talked about Aretha milking you with two notes is something specific and teachable, but also something that can’t be taught.

It is the ability to make the space between notes as expressive as the notes themselves, to hold a note slightly longer than expected and then release it in a way that makes the release feel like a whole new idea. To approach a note from below and arrive at it with a weight that makes the listener feel they have been carried somewhere.

Janis Joplin’s voice was powerful. It was raw. It was devastating at full volume. What it was less naturally equipped for was that space between notes, the restraint, the approach, the arrival. She was working on it. The Pearl sessions show it. Paul Rothchild, who had produced Doors albums and understood subtlety, was helping her find it.

The Full Tilt Boogie Band was the most sophisticated musical context she had ever worked in. She was getting there. The final recording suggests she was getting there. She ran out of time. Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I’ll get it. She didn’t get to keep singing. She got to 27. She got to Mercedes-Benz one take a cappella.

The voice completely alone with nothing to hide behind and nothing to amplify it. And in that recording, if you listen, you can hear her finding something. The space between the notes, the pause before the next line, the way she holds the word Lord just slightly longer than necessary and releases it with a weight that says, I know exactly what I’m asking for and I know I won’t get it.

Two notes, the whole universe. She was getting there. Aretha Franklin heard about Janis Joplin’s death in October 1970. She did not make a public statement. She continued working. She continued recording. She continued finding with two notes the whole universe. She lived until 2018. She was 76 years old. For 48 years after Janis died, Aretha Franklin kept singing.

She never knew, or perhaps never fully understood, that in a house in Port Arthur, Texas, a teenage girl had listened to her records and heard the place she wanted to go. She never knew that in a letter home in January 1968, the woman Rolling Stone was calling the best female voice of her generation had written, “Aretha is by far and away the best thing in music right now.

” Here is what this story asks you. Who do you listen to and think, “I want to get there.” Not where they are, that is their place, not yours. But the thing they can do that you cannot yet do. The two notes that say the whole universe. Whatever your version of that is, Janis Joplin was possibly the best female voice of her generation.

Rolling Stone said so. The sold-out arenas said so. The 7,000 frozen people at Monterey said so. And she sat down and wrote a letter home to say, “Yes, but Aretha is better.” She was not diminishing herself. She was locating her aspiration. She was saying, “I know where I want to go and I am going there.

Maybe if I keep singing, maybe I’ll get it.” She kept singing. Right up until one take, a cappella, alone in a booth on a Thursday afternoon in October 1970. She was getting there. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.