Pearl

The definitive biography of the 1960s music legend covers her trailblazing life from troubled childhood to iconic stardom to her tragically early death. A wild child of the Texas-Louisiana swamps, Janis Joplin wailed the blues like no one before had ever dared. She was the first rock star of the 1960s counterculture, a fashion trendsetter in San Francisco's back-to-the-roots movement that overtook the world, and a prisoner of an ultimately doomed search for happiness in sex, drugs, money, and fame. But to those who knew and loved her intimately, she was Pearl. Acclaimed music biographer Ellis Amburn reveals the true life story of this immortal legend. From her backwater Texas childhood where classmates punished her for her individuality, Amburn charts her unlikely rise to stardom and affairs with fellow music legends including Jim Morrison, Kris Kristofferson, and Jimi Hendrix. Amburn also chronicles her losing battles with addiction, insecurity, and other forces that drove her through a short, impulsive life, to death by overdose at the age of twenty-seven.