The Rose - Janis Joplin and the Lonely Sixties

The Rose - Janis Joplin and the Lonely Sixties

[1] What is it about the Sixties that still linger in the minds of the American population forty years later? For many the Sixties was a time of liberation, a time of true freedom, but it was also a time of struggle and oppression. This was a decade that prided itself on overcoming obstacles of race, gender, and even sexuality. The Sixties was an experience that many people wish they could relive, and other survivors of the decade refuse to even remember. Perhaps the one thing that sticks strongly in my own mind are the passings of many great individuals -- the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcom X. The second half of the decade marks itself with the untimely deaths of rock legends Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and the subject of this essay -- Janis Joplin.

[2] After the fifties, Americans were emotionally dead. During the next decade the population would search again for the “grand ideals” of democracy. The American people were looking for something in the 1960’s; they were searching for ideals and dreams. The Sixties were a “time of rebellion, defiance of authority, acting out hopes and dreams. . . a time of reconsidering the way we lived, the way we behaved toward people in this country and abroad” (Zinn in Morgan, ix). During the Sixties people began to take into account American history and began to attempt to redress the past. Perhaps the largest and most influential group in motivating the American people was musicians. They began to put the feeling of America into songs, and they used those songs to fight for what they believed in, from anti-war songs to sexual liberation and free drug use. It was the fight for ...

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... showed the world just how lonely it could be at the top. Many people loved the Sixties, but it would not be a surprise that those who don’t wish to remember it had the same feelings of loneliness as Joplin felt. Fighting for others meant forgetting about oneself; unfortunately for many, the way to “find” your true self was through the use of drugs. To many it was seen as the gateway to the soul, and to those performers like Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison, it was also the gateway to death.

Works Cited

Echols, Alice. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. Ontario: Fitzhenry Whiteside LTD, 1999.

Goldman, Albert. “The Emergence of Rock.” The Sixties. Ed. Gerald Howard. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. 343-64.

Morgan, Edward P. The Sixties Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1991.