On October 1, 1970, Janis Joplin walked into a Los Angeles recording studio and laid down vocals for a song that wasn’t even originally written for her, a tender, road-worn tune called “Me and Bobby McGee.” Three days later, she was found dead in her hotel room, and the recording she’d just finished would become the only number-one hit of her career.
The song itself had an unusual history before Joplin ever touched it. Songwriter Kris Kristofferson originally wrote it with a male singer’s voice in mind, inspired partly by a secretary he knew in the Nashville music industry. Country singer Roger Miller recorded the first version in 1969, and several other country artists followed before Joplin ever got involved. Joplin had actually been previously involved with Kristofferson romantically, and learned the song through their overlapping circle of friends in the Los Angeles music scene, reworking some of the lyrics and flipping the gender of the central character to fit her own voice.
By the fall of 1970, Joplin appeared, by most outward measures, to be doing well. She was engaged to be married, working steadily on her new album with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, and reportedly in good spirits about both her personal life and her musical direction. None of that visible stability prevented what happened next. In the early hours of October 4, 1970, Joplin died alone in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood, the victim of an accidental heroin overdose. She was only 27 years old, the same age Jimi Hendrix had been when he died just over two weeks earlier.
Kristofferson learned what had happened to his song in an oddly devastating way. According to his own account, Joplin’s producer invited him into his office shortly after her death and simply played him the recording, without warning him in advance about what he was about to hear. Kristofferson has said he spent the rest of that day walking around Los Angeles in tears, processing the loss of someone he’d cared about while hearing, for the first time, the way she’d reshaped his own song into something entirely her own.
“Me and Bobby McGee” was released as a single in January 1971, three months after Joplin’s death, and shot to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that spring. It appeared on her posthumous album “Pearl,” which also topped the charts and became the best-selling record of her career. Joplin never lived to see any of that success unfold, leaving behind a final recording session that, in hindsight, played almost like a goodbye she never intended to write. Kristofferson has continued performing the song for decades since, telling interviewers that audiences rarely sing the lyrics exactly as he originally wrote them, since most of the world learned the song through Joplin’s reworked version rather than his own, a strange kind of immortality for a song that nearly outgrew the man who wrote it.