Janis Joplin, the pioneering 1960s singer Dolly Parton “never cared for”
There are hardly any musicians in the world who have managed to carry themselves with as much class as Dolly Parton has.
Sure, there have been plenty of moments where she has had public spats with people who have wronged her, but there are hardly any points throughout history where she doesn’t look like one of the most wholesome figures that anyone has ever seen, in Nashville or otherwise. But Parton could be blunt when she needed to be, and she knew that some singers weren’t necessarily for her when she listened to the sounds of rock and roll.
Granted, Parton was the first person to say that she was out of her comfort zone whenever she listened to rock and roll. She had grown up as one of the leading forces in country music, and even if she got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there were more than a few times when she felt that she didn’t have the kind of chops to be inducted alongside the likes of Judas Priest or any other heavy metal band.
Then again, all that should matter in the grand scheme of things is great songs, and Parton has more than her fair share of iconic tunes in her back pocket. Every single record that she ever made didn’t have to be the most memorable thing that anyone had ever heard, but when you look at her track record for songwriting, you could usually count on her creating those one or two tunes that could break your heart like ‘I Will Always Love You’.
But she was also the first to admit that some of her country counterparts didn’t have to have the most versatile voice in the world to be good. Even if she got hot and bothered for the first time when she heard Johnny Cash singing onstage, she wasn’t going to be the one claiming that he had one of the most versatile voices in the world. He knew how to work with what he had, and the same could be said for Janis Joplin.
No one had any reference point for what Joplin was doing, though, and when you look at her earliest records with Big Brother and the Holding Company, she was already coming from a much different place than the average rock and roll singer. She was making those runs that could make the greatest blues singers hang their heads in shame, but Parton wasn’t going to say that she enjoyed her voice every time she sang ‘Ball and Chain’.
If she couldn’t see the appeal of Joplin, Parton could at least appreciate where she was coming from a lot of the time she sang, saying, “Her voice was like mine, you either liked it or you didn’t. I never particularly cared for it. It was different. But I do appreciate what she left behind in the world of music.” And it’s not like Joplin didn’t know how to tone things down every now and again whenever she wrote her masterpieces.
‘Me and Bobby McGee’ is one of the few songs in her catalogue that could have been sung by Parton and no one would have noticed the difference, and that’s the kind of range that any other artist would kill for. No one else could turn off a voice that strong and suddenly make their voice soft and gentle, but Joplin could definitely find the time to show people her vulnerable side once they broke the acoustic guitars.
So while a Parton-led version of a song like ‘Cry Baby’ probably wasn’t in the cards, the fact that she could see the raw talent that Joplin had meant a lot more than actually liking her music. Because for someone who was as singularly talented as Joplin was, it was better for people to understand what she was about well before they decided whether or not they were a fan of her music.
