Who wrote the Janis Joplin song ‘Me and Bobby McGee’?
Within four months of her tragic death from a heroin overdose, Janis Joplin became the second artist to score a posthumous US number one hit with the rollicking country blues rocker ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. It was her only chart topper, but gained her the wider recognition that her unique take on the blues and charismatically soulful vocals had always warranted.
Starting off as a gently swaying country number with Joplin’s prominent East-Texan accent its most distinctive feature, the singer’s recording of the number builds to a blues-rock crescendo that brings her trademark, deep-throated rasp to the fore. Behind her, Joplin’s band swing harder than a deadbeat boxer, with Richard Bell on piano and John Till on lead guitar ramping up the jam at just the right moment in Joplin’s slipstream.
Joplin’s version of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, which was also included on her landmark album Pearl, may be the definitive one. But the track had already been recorded by three other artists the time she got to it. Honky-tonk country singer Roger Miller was the first to release it as a single in 1969, before Canadian Gordon Lightfoot’s rendition arrived a year later. Both their versions received airplay on country radio stations and made a minor splash, but neither reached the mainstream.
For most listeners, Joplin’s recording is the first they heard and the only one worth hearing. Which is fitting, given the personal significance the song carried for the late singer. Just before she died, she was romantically linked to its songwriter, the third artist to have recorded the track before Joplin, and she appears to have decided to sing it on a whim as a tribute to her erstwhile boyfriend.
So, who was the man she sang it for?
‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was almost certainly the last song Joplin finished recording for Pearl before her death. Its composer, who was shooting his first film, The Last Movie, in Peru throughout September and October 1970, only found out about her recording upon hearing that she’d died. Which must have made the loss all the more devastating for him, given that her rendition is clearly about him.
Kris Kristofferson had written the song to order for the head of his record company, Fred Foster, adapting the name of studio employee Barbara ‘Bobbie’ McKee for its title. He based the lyrics on the closing scene of Federico Fellini’s 1954 neo-realist film La Strada, in which the male protagonist Zampanò breaks down after finding out about the death of his former lover Gelsomina. A backstory that adds further agonising irony to Joplin’s recording of the song days before she died.
She changes the gender references in the lyrics, however, turning herself into the one pining after a man named Bobby McGee instead. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” she sings. “Nothin’, an’ that’s all that Bobby left me.” This latter line is a stark alteration of Kristofferson’s lyric, “Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free,” which serves to heighten the sense of emotional loss she feels.
Once Joplin had brought the song to public attention, Kristofferson made it a regular feature of his live performances, including the shows he played in the 1980s and ‘90s as part of the country supergroup The Highwaymen with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. And it’s arguably the greatest single work of art he leaves behind as a singer-songwriter, following his own passing at the end of a prolific life in music and cinema.
