Janis Joplin

To quote from Bill Malone in _Stars of Country Music_, writing about redneck rock in Austin, pages 437-38:

"Since 1933, when it opened with the first beer license granted in Travis County after the repeal of Prohibition, Threadgill's Bar, housed in an abandoned gas station, functioned as a headquarters for hard country music. The proprietor, Kenneth Threadgill, dispensed beer and sang and yodeled Jimmie Rodgers's songs; he acted as a genial host to anyone who wanted to sing country music and also as a father confessor to the students who frequented the place. In the late fifties and early sixties a nucleus of graduate students, composed of Willie Benson, Ed Mellon, Stan Alexander, and Bill Malone, gathered at Threadgill's on a weekly basis, and sometimes more often, to sing everything from old-time country music and bluegrass to honky-tonk. About 1962, as a microcosmic indication of what was happening in American music as a whole, `folk-oriented' youth with hippie inclinations, such as Janis Joplin, began to visit Threadgill's with regularity. In those pre-rock and pre-San Francisco days, Joplin performed with a bluegrass group called the Waller Creek Boys, strummed an autoharp, and sang Carter Family songs and gospel tunes in addition to the country blues which were then dearest to her heart."

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Judy McCulloh
U of Illinois Press