12 January 2011 JANIS JOPLIN: RISE UP SINGING by Ann Angel, Introduction by Sam Andrew, Amulet Books, October 2010, 128pp, ISBN: 978-0-8109-8349-6

"One of these mornings,

You're gonna rise, rise up singing,

You're gonna spread your wings,

Child, and take, take to the sky,

Lord, the sky"

-- from "Summertime" by George Gershwin, recorded by Big Brother and the Holding Co. on Cheap Thrills

"This was an era for fitting in."Janis tried.  She joined the Future Teachers of America, the staff of the school newspaper, and the art club.  But all that joining didn't help much with the girls at her school.  Janis was too loud, her clothes too dark, her opinions too strange.  While 'nice' girls listened to songs about chaste love sung by well-scrubbed stars such as Pat Boone and Debbie Reynolds, Janis liked black music -- blues songs about hard work, loss, and pain.  She spoke out in class in favor of integration, of having black and white children attend the same schools.  In a place like Texas, where separate neighborhoods, schools, churches, and even public bathrooms were the norm for blacks and whites, Janis's opinion deepened the chasm between her and her classmates.  For a while, two boys followed her around her all-white school, pitching pennies at her and calling her 'nigger lover.'"

There is nothing better than a high-interest work of nonfiction for adolescents that reads cover to cover like an engaging novel.  That is what we find in JANIS JOPLIN: RISE UP SINGING, the 2011 winner of the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults.  

Author Ann Angel mined books, old newspaper articles, websites, and then conducted extensive interviews with those still alive who knew her subject intimately in order to convey the tragic story of the rise and fall of Janis Joplin, who left her Cold War adolescence in that ass-backward Texas town, became the world's first female rock star, and then died alone in a motel room at age 27, from an overdose of heroin and alcohol, just days after recording some of her most memorable and lasting songs.  Published exactly forty years after her death, this is a story that repeatedly returns to the impact that Janis's adolescence has on her life after escaping Texas.  We feel the tension within this talented and oft-troubled young woman who clearly did not want to settle for the traditional path that her peers were so automatically following but, beneath her posing and stardom, also seemed to want a bit of the intimacy and security that she never really did find.   

"When I'm on the road, playin' in a town without a name,

Honey, I'm feelin' low and everyone looks the same.

Well, it's lookin' good and you're the one that's lovin' tonight,

Don't you go and spoil it babe, by tryin' to get yourself all uptight."

-- Steve Gordon & Barry Flast, "One Night Stand" recorded by Janis Joplin with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band six months before her death

No corners were cut here in providing honest and detailed information about Janis, her one-night stands, and about the drugs she and those in that era were ingesting and shooting up.  Nor are any corners cut in providing a visual feast of Sixties iconography and so much more: Janis' influences like Odetta, and Bessie Smith; others in the San Francisco music scene, including a great photo of Chet Helms and Bill Graham; stunning full-page reproduction of psychedelic Avalon Ballroom posters featuring Big Brother and the Holding Co.; a wealth of Janis and Big Brother photos I've never seen; and, by far, the hottest photo of a young Kris Kristofferson that I've ever seen.

I love how Ann Angel concludes the story by quoting from another voice I well remember from those days, the also tragically lost-so-young Lillian Roxon who summed up Janis's influence:

"'[Janis] perfectly expressed the feelings and yearnings of the girls of the electric generation -- to be all woman, yet equal with men; to be free, yet a slave to real love, to [reject] every outdated convention, and yet get back to the basics of life.'"

An extraordinary tale about an unforgettable voice and persona, JANIS JOPLIN: RISE UP SINGING is truly not to be missed.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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