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Out of imitation there slowly developed the timing, phrasing, inflections, and talent at evoking changing moods that were the Joplin trademarks. Janis did not read music, but at the roadhouses or at home listening to records of Odetta, Bessie Smith, or Willie Mae Thornton, she had an uncanny ability to imitate the sounds she heard. There were the lyrics and rhythms of country, gospel, jazz, soul, and the blues. There were Anglo, African American, Cajun, Mexican, and Caribbean sounds.

In her junior year she found acceptance in a small group of Jefferson High beatniks who read Jack Kerouac and roamed the nightspots from Port Arthur to New Orleans, thus mining one of the motherlodes of American ethnic music. Bereft of friends, without dates for school dances, ashamed of her acned face and overweight figure, Janis responded with contempt and insults to cover the rejection that scarred her for the rest of her life. Signs of rebellion, however, against the religious, sexual, and racial conservatism of her environment were evident in junior high school, and by the time Janis graduated from Jefferson High School in Port Arthur in 1960, her vocabulary of four letter words, her outrageous clothes, and her reputation for sexual promiscuity and drunkenness (signs of alcoholism were already apparent) caused her classmates to call her derogatory names. The future queen of nonconformity is remembered as a bright, pretty, and artistic little girl. She grew up in a respectable middle-class home her father was an engineer and her mother a Sunday school teacher.

Janis Lyn Joplin, blues and rock singer, daughter of Seth Ward and Dorothy (East) Joplin, was born on January 19, 1943, in Port Arthur, Texas.