Janis Lyn Joplin was born on January 19, 1943 at 9:50 am in St. Mary’s Hospital in Port Arthur, Texas. Her father, Seth Joplin, worked at Texaco, and she had two younger siblings, Michael and Laura. When she had acclaim she admitted that the Empress of the blues singer, contralto Bessie Smith (1894-1937) and the voice of the Civil Rights movement, Odetta¹ ( 1930-2008) was her vocal inspiration.
She has a wonderful voice and died too young from a heroin overdose on October 3, 1970 in Hollywood California. We have rectified this chart to 28 Aquarius that highlights her eccentric and unique bluesy-rock style. She has little earth in her chart for which she compensated for by overweight and visceral jazzy appeal.
She could be a bucket with a Neptune handle in the seventh house but there is a grand trine in air which gives her a possibility of a wheelbarrow with the Mars and Neptune far enough apart for handles. Instead of Venus in the tenth like actresses, she has Mars in Sagittarius there, demonstrating how musicians travel for their supper while actors may instead get long stage runs.
But maybe, we have try a little bit harder.
Let us try again, because grand air trine and the two open spaces on either side are both less than 120 degrees and so she becomes a Locomotive and it makes sense. No one pushed Janis to succeed like Ms. Joplin, she was a tireless worker, traversing the country East to West and then North to South for every venue she could book.
Her career was meteoritic — from joining Big Brother in 1966 to her death when she was in the Full Tilt Boogie Band for four years but her output was prolific.
She had no problem getting songwriters to pen songs for her like her famous Me and Bobby McGee, written by former lover, Kris Kristofferson, one of the many who were convinced that she did not commit suicide, but was just an adventure junkie that unfortunately ran right off the rails.
The seventh house is obviously her partnership with Big Brother and The Holding Company in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco that propelled her career. The big trine of Neptune to Mercury to Uranus is how she sang her poetry, like Bob Dylan, with Uranus showing how her friends and peers were really a “piece of heart heart.” because she knew everyone — Gracie Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan & Jimi Hendrix & Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Jim Morrison of the Doors.
The last three of these friends all died of heroin overdose too, so it has always been speculation of who shot up with whom.
But there is more to Janis than that. There is her public adoration with so many of her planets in the public Southern hemisphere including her Sun in the eleventh showing a strong liberated female.
Janis was strong and independent an icon of the Sixties but there were always her private fear in the northern hemisphere scattered below about her desire to be part of a “family,” — perhaps the reason for the groups built all around her.
The sextile between Neptune and the Moon right on the fourth house cusp tells us that her Southern Comfort drinking was another problem. Indeed, while on stage Ms. Joplin smoked and drank throughout her performance in attempt to fortify her courage.
It was a lethal habit.
Footnotes:
- The voice recording is Janis at Woodstock, New York, August 14 1969.
- Odetta Holmes, always called Odetta, was the “Queen of American Folk Blues” according to the Reverend Martin Luther King, jr. and Janis Joplin claimed to have learned “everything she sang.”
- Bob Dylan said that
“The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson. . . . [That album was] just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record.”
