Kristofferson misheard her name as “McGee”, but took on the assignment. Bobby McKee was a secretary in Foster’s building. “Me and Bobby McGee” was his breakthrough, but it wasn’t entirely his idea.įred Foster, the boss of Monument Records, challenged Kristofferson to write a song with the title “Me and Bobby McKee”, about a pair of drifters, with the twist being that Bobby was a girl. A former army captain and Rhodes Scholar, Kristofferson would become a successful actor and singer, but in the late 1960s he was jobbing as a studio gopher in Nashville as he tried to make it as a songwriter.
Kris Kristofferson, an old flame, was the author, although he didn’t write it for her either, and his song proved an instant country classic. Joplin’s version might be definitive - it’s easy to imagine her travelling every mile of the lovers’ journey from Kentucky to California - but she didn’t write “Me and Bobby McGee”, nor was hers the earliest cover. Joplin’s telling of “Me and Bobby McGee” would be her epitaph its vocal shot through with all her “hurts and confusions” yet also her immense vitality and rowdy romantic vigour. A heroin overdose killed her in October 1970, but the following January one of her last recorded songs became a US No 1 single. A self-described Texan “misfit”, she outrageously lived - and died - the rock’n’roll life, blasting the Monterey Pop festival with her volcanic eruption of a blues voice, dressing in tripped-out granny chic and commissioning the cult cartoonist Robert Crumb to create an album sleeve.
Few artists embodied the 1960s counter-culture as fully or as fatally as Janis Joplin.
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