The Rock Hall’s American Music Masters series: Kosmik Blues: The Life and Music of Janis Joplin, is in full swing. At 7 p.m. tomorrow night, the Rock Hall will welcome to its 4th-floor Foster Theater one of Joplin’s early music-making colleagues, Jorma Kaukonen. He’ll be speaking and playing music.
Kaukonen is best known as the lead guitarist with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. He arrived in San Francisco in 1962 and met Joplin shortly after that when she was newly arrived from Texas. He played guitar on one of her earliest known recordings, a homemade effort known as The Typewriter Tapes. Currently, he lives in southeast Ohio where he owns Fur Peace Ranch, a music camp, to pass along his musical legacy.
“I first met Janis in the Fall of 1962 at a hootenanny in San Jose, California,” he recalls. “I had just come to California that week to go to school at the University of Santa Clara. There was a note of some sort on a telephone pole that said, ‘Hootenanny this weekend.’ How could I miss that?”
Like Joplin, Kaukonen was already a serious blues aficionado, who had no intention of getting into rock ’n’ roll. He recognized in her a fellow traveler. “She was a traditional blues singer of uncommon ability and was definitely an old soul … extremely sophisticated,” he says, belying the popular notion that Joplin’s art welled up from an unschooled vat of anguish.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2009.