Janis Joplin - Ball and Chain

From a 1976 essay by Ellen Willis, originally published in "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll." Ellen Willis died last week of lung cancer at the age of 64.

Still, the songs she sang assumed heterosexual romance; it was men who made her hurt, who took another little piece of her heart. Watching men groove on Janis, I began to appreciate the resentment many black people feel toward whites who are blues freaks. Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it, they would not have her to dig. In a way their adulation was the cruelest insult of all. And Janis's response -- to sing harder, get higher, be worshiped more -- was rebellious, acquiescent, bewildered all at once. When she said, "Onstage I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home alone," she was not merely repeating the cliché of the sad clown or the poor little rich girl. She was noting that the more she gave, the less she got, and that honey, it ain't fair.

Like most women singers, Joplin did not write many songs; she mostly interpreted other people's. But she made them her own in a way few singers dare to do. She did not sing them so much as struggle with them, assault them. Some critics complained, not always unfairly, that she strangled them to death, but at her best she whipped them to new life. She had an analogous adversary relationship with the musical form that dominated her imagination -- the blues. Blues represented another external structure, one with its own contradictory tradition of sexual affirmation and sexist conservatism. But Janis used blues conventions to reject blues sensibility. To sing the blues is a way of transcending pain by confronting it with dignity, but Janis wanted nothing less than to scream it out of existence. Big Mama Thornton's classic rendition of "Ball and Chain" carefully balances defiance and resignation, toughness and vulnerability. She almost pities her oppressor: "I know you're gonna miss me, baby ... You'll find that your whole life will be like mine, all wrapped up in a ball and chain." Her singing conveys, above all, her determination to survive abuse. Janis makes the song into one long frenzied, despairing protest. Why, why, why, she asks over and over, like a child unable to comprehend injustice. "It ain't fair ... this can't be ... I just wanted to hold you ... All I ever wanted to do was to love you." The pain is overwhelming her, "draggin' me down ... maybe, maybe you can help me -- c'mon help me." There are similar differences between her recording of "Piece of My Heart" and Erma Franklin's. When Franklin sings it, it is a challenge: no matter what you do to me, I will not let you destroy my ability to be human, to love. Joplin seems rather to be saying, surely if I keep taking this, if I keep setting an example of love and forgiveness, surely he has to understand, change, give me back what I have given.

Michael Bérubé has more on Ellen Willis, one of his "Politics 'n Prose" heroes.