White woman in North American popular music in the early 1960s were expected to be one of a few types. There was the earnest folk music type with long hair who didn't wear very much make-up and sang very seriously about love, politics, and social injustice. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the teeny bopper, pop singer who could be seen on American Bandstand wondering who would take her to the prom or crying about the boy who broke her heart. As long as a woman agreed to play one of those roles and had a modicum of talent she could ride the back of the music industry up the pop charts.
Of course women didn't have to be like that, and as the decade progressed there were those who charted their own path instead of worrying about the path up the charts, but you'd have to look long and hard for them.This attitude has more to do with the nature of popular music than any sort of sexism as there has always seemed to be some sort of law against demonstrating real emotion while singing if you want to be on the hit parade. Like cotton candy, popular music has always been light and fluffy with little or no substance. It wasn't Elvis's sex appeal that was so scary when he burst on the scene, it was that his music stirred emotions, and even worse, he sang with emotion.
While that was all right for jazz and blues singers, it just wouldn't do for pop music, so all those rough edges had to be smoothed down, and the raw energy turned down. So popular music was scrubbed clean of as much of its "colour" as possible in order to make it palatable for as many people as possible. So when Janis Joplin came along sounding like Big Momma Thornton and fronting a band playing psychedelic blues it was unlike anything the majority of people had heard before. By the time she got to Woodstock in 1969 she was getting ready to release her I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama. For reasons that have always escaped me her performances at the festival weren't included in the movie or its soundtrack, so the Legacy Recordings two disc release Janis Joplin: The Woodstock Experience is like a forty year old mistake finally being corrected.
Disc one of the set is a reissue of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama and disc two is her complete performance from August 17, '69 at the Woodstock festival. The album and the gig marked a change for Joplin as they were the beginnings of her solo career. For her performance at the festival she took the chance of mixing material from her forthcoming album which people wouldn't know with old crowd favourites like "Ball And Chain", "Piece Of My Heart", and the Gershwin classic "Summertime". Some of her new material included "Try ( Just A Little Bit Harder)", Kozmic Blues", and her cover of the Bee Gees "To Love Somebody".
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