Video janis joplin me and bobby mcgee12/9/2023 ![]() It just blew Fred away.īut there was one problem. So we stayed up all night making the demo of it. Found Billy Swan back at Columbine Music, he was the only guy who was still there when I got back to Nashville. I was driving to the airport in New Orleans, and the windshield wipers were going into the line about “the windshield wipers slapping time and Bobbie clapping hands…” And it finished the song for me.Īnd I went back. And I can remember when the last line came to me. So I had to hide for a couple months.īut then the idea just started growing in my head. It gives me the worst case of writer’s block that I’d ever seen. I thought he said “McGee.” And he told me to go write the song. And Boudleaux’s secretary was named Bobbie McKee. Fred was the guy who owned Monument Records and Columbine, which I was writing for at the time. He called up one time when I was about to go back down to the gulf for another week of flying and he said, “I got a song tile for you: “Me and Bobby McGee.”īoudleaux Bryant, the songwriter, had an office in Fred’s building. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC.But it was an idea that Fred Foster had given to me. Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlikely Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969) Janis Joplin’s Last TV Performance & Interview: The Dick Cavett Show (1970) Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Interview Get Reborn as an Animated Cartoon “Joplin might’ve never hitchhiked across the country with anyone named Bobby McGee,” but she “did what great interpreters do.” She made the song “about Janis Joplin, because that’s what Janis Joplin made it.” ![]() “Instead, she just lets it rip, her phrasing immediate and instinctive,” howling at the stars like Anthony Quinn. ![]() Written as a country song, Joplin doesn’t quite sing it that way, and she “doesn’t really sing it as blues or psychedelic rock either,” writes Breihan. But Joplin “made it her own,” Kristofferson says, and it’s no empty cliché. (The Louisiana references come in because Kristofferson was working as a helicopter pilot in the Gulf at the time.)Ī long list of famous singers has covered the song, originally recorded by Roger Miller-just about anyone you might name in folk and country. Foster gave Kristofferson the title “Me and Bobby McKee,” Kristofferson misheard the last name, assumed it was a man, and wrote the famous lyrics, inspired not by Barbara but by Federico Fellini’s La Strada, in which Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina travel together on a motorcycle as a performing duo. It was written, in 1969, about a woman, Barbara “Bobby” McKee, who worked as a secretary in songwriter Fred Foster’s building. Many people have assumed Kristofferson wrote the song for Joplin, but that’s not the case: he didn’t know she was recording it at all. Just blew me away.” Above, you can hear a rare recording, possibly the first take, and possibly one of the early versions Kristofferson heard in the studio. He met the producer of Joplin’s last album, Pearl, in L.A., who told him to come to the studio “to play me her recording of ‘Bobby McGee.’ And it just blew me away. “You can’t think of that song without thinking of Janis,” says Kris Kristofferson of Janis Joplin’s raw, bittersweet, posthumously released “ Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson, who wrote the song, only heard Joplin’s version after her death, when he returned to California after playing the Isle of Wight in 1970.
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