Mississippi Queen: Joplin Sings for Etta James

Etta James said At Last like she meant every syllable of all three words individually. At. Last. The weight in those two syllables was the weight of a woman who had been kept waiting — by the music industry, by the men in her life, by a culture that wanted her voice but not her personhood — and was announcing, in the most musical way possible, that the waiting was over.

Janis Joplin heard that record and understood completely. Not as a fan. As a student. As someone who was still figuring out what her own voice was capable of, listening to a woman who had already answered that question.

Mississippi Queen is Janis singing for Etta. The title plays on three things at once: the Mountain song, the Mississippi River that runs through the blues tradition both women inhabited, and Etta James's specific Southern root system — Los Angeles by birth, but Mississippi by musical heritage.

The Freight Train Standard

Etta James once said she wanted to sound like she had been hit by a freight train and lived to tell about it. Janis Joplin once said she wanted to feel everything so hard it left marks. Neither of them was speaking metaphorically.

Both of them were describing the same aesthetic — the blues philosophy that the voice is not for display but for survival. That you sing the way you sing because you have no other option for getting the feeling out. That the alternative to singing it is carrying it, and carrying it will eventually kill you, so you might as well sing.

The track understands that these two women were on parallel tracks. Etta was sent to a reform school at fourteen for a voice that was considered too powerful, too sexual, too uncontrollable for a girl her age. Janis was told throughout her childhood in Port Arthur, Texas, that she was too much — too loud, too messy, too uncomfortable for the conservative world around her.

Both of them converted that rejection into fuel.

The Age Gap

The track's most moving dimension is the asymmetry of their deaths.

Etta James lived to eighty. She performed into her sixties. She gave decades of music to anyone who would listen, and she did it on her own terms after spending years fighting for those terms. Janis Joplin died at twenty-seven, in a hotel in Los Angeles, without ever finding out what her voice would become in its thirties, its forties, its eighties.

The lyric holds this without self-pity: I think about what I could have been / What I could have sung / Given more of what she had / Given more of time / Given more of lung.

That last image — given more of lung — is the whole track in three words. The voice as physical organ. The loss as biological. The grief not for a career but for a body that stopped too soon.

Mississippi queen — guess what, I found Harris / Down here where the blues keep right on living.

Lord have mercy, Etta. You showed all of us how it's done.