How the girl who was called ugly became the sexiest woman alive

People would say she was so ugly.

For the life of me, I never ever saw her that way.

She was slim and trim, thick hair, a bit of a native pretty look to her eyes, never needed makeup and could sing like angels calling from heaven.

Very different from the start
On January 19, 1943, a baby girl was born in Port Arthur, Texas. Her parents were everyday working folks and perfectly normal. Her mother, Dorothy, worked at a local college, and her father, Seth, was an engineer at Texaco.

The family was deeply religious and sought a quiet, God-centered life. But it quickly became clear that their daughter was different from other kids. She demanded more attention and had a unique spark that set her apart.

From an early age, it was obvious she was drawn to unconventional people and determined to carve her own path.

The artist grew up in a deeply segregated town, at a time when integration was fiercely debated — this was the era of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. They and their friends stood out as the town’s intellectual liberals, curious about the world and eager to understand the African-American experience. They devoured beatnik literature, soaked in jazz, and listened closely to folk blues.

She became Port Arthur’s first female beatnik, frizzed her hair by drying it in the oven, skipped wearing a bra, and developed her own unmistakable cackle of a laugh… a friend once remembered her asking, “Was it irritation enough?”

The star discovered a love for singing in high school, especially blues and folk music. But those years were far from easy. She faced relentless bullying and was socially ostracized.

As a teenager, she struggled with weight and severe acne, leaving her face scarred. The scarring was so pronounced that she eventually underwent procedures to improve her appearance.

As one classmate recalled, according to Alice Echols’ biography:

“She’d been cute, and all of a sudden she was ugly.”

Her younger sister Laura described her skin as “a never-ending series of painful bright red pimples.”

“Ugliest man on campus”
The future star enrolled at a local college before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin.

At campus, she went barefoot when she felt like it, wore Levi’s to class because they were more comfortable, and carried her autoharp with her everywhere she went so that if the urge to break into song struck, it would be handy.

“She ran with a tight group who hung out with books and ideas,” her younger sister, Laura, recalled in a documentary.

In 1962, while at UT Austin, the future icon nearly “won” a campus contest for the “ugliest man on campus.” Whether she entered as a joke or nominated herself remains unclear, but friends who were there that year agree it humiliated her.

”She felt like an outsider. She couldn’t identify with the same goals and desires that a lot of her classmates had,” her sister said.

Sadly, the focus on her appearance would shadow her throughout her career, sometimes overshadowing her incredible talent. The scars and unconventional looks became part of her story. Many people doubted she belonged on stage because of her appearance, and she felt their judgment deeply.

Climb to fame
But there was one thing no one could resist with this woman.

And it’s what carried her to the highest heights: her voice.

The artist’s climb to fame began in January 1963, when she dropped out of college and hitched a ride to San Francisco, chasing her dream of making it as a performer.

She sang in coffeehouses and lived off handouts, and everyone who heard her recognized the raw talent that promised stardom. But in the early 1960s, most record label scouts were hunting for young, conventionally attractive women — a category she didn’t fit.

Her true gift shone in the folk scene, which was largely underground and untouched by commercial pressures.

Back in Austin, the star had gained a reputation for drinking. In San Francisco, that habit escalated, and she fell into the city’s drug scene. Speed was still legal and easy to get; when it became harder to find, she turned to heroin.

”I wanted to smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope, anything I could lay my hands on I wanted to do it,” she once told reporter.

Especially after she broke through, she began turning to heroin as a way to numb herself from all the pressures and the fear of what it was like being a solo artist at that stage of her career. Throughout her life, she experimented with other psychoactive drugs and drank heavily, her favorite being Southern Comfort.

After two years in San Francisco, the aspiring singer was a complete wreck.

By 1965, she had fled back to Texas, weighing just six stone. She spent a year at home getting herself together. Old classmates suddenly saw her in dresses and makeup, her hair neatly pulled into a bun. She went into therapy, re-enrolled in college, and even talked seriously about becoming a secretary.

But when a call came to lure her back to San Francisco to sing with a new band called Big Brother and the Holding Company, it was all over.

Icon of the counterculture movement
While she had been away, San Francisco had suddenly become the hippest city in the world, and she was about to become one of the biggest icons of the counterculture movement.

In June 1966, the band played the Monterey Pop Festival, originally booked for a low-profile afternoon slot. But the moment people heard her sing, the crowd went wild, and the band was quickly rescheduled to play a prime evening set the next day. Bob Dylan’s manager spotted them and signed them to Columbia Records for $250,000.

Their performance at Monterey Pop became the band’s — and their female singer’s— major breakthrough. In an instant, the once dumpy, acne-marked woman who always griped that she couldn’t get any attention suddenly became the sexiest woman alive. She went through men like they were Kleenex and made sure the media was in the loop, even bragging to Rolling Stone about her one-night fling with football star Joe Namath. There were also rumors that she had a fling with U.S. talk show host Dick Cavett, who interviewed her on multiple occasions.

“I’m not a warthog that nobody wants to climb in bed with. Everyone want to climb in bed with me,” she said.

She was the first female rock star to achieve true celebrity and icon status, landing on the covers of major magazines like Newsweek and Rolling Stone.

So who is this legendary woman we’re talking about?

Of course, it’s none other than Janis Joplin.

American singer-songwriter Janis Joplin posing for a portrait in San Francisco, United States circa 1967-1968. (Photo by Ray Andersen/Fantality Corporation/Getty Images)
Back in the day, long before filters, makeup, or cosmetic surgery, Janis Joplin was a bona fide sex symbol — because her voice alone screamed beauty and power. After cutting two albums with Big Brother, she struck out on her own, first with the Kozmic Blues Band and later with the Full Tilt Boogie Band.

Joplin scored five hits on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, including her iconic posthumous chart-topper, a cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” which hit number one in March 1971.

Some of her most unforgettable tracks include her powerhouse covers of “Piece of My Heart,” “Cry Baby,” “Down on Me,” “Ball and Chain,” and “Summertime,” along with her haunting original “Mercedes Benz,” her last-ever recording.

Wanted to please her parents
Her musical heroes were Odetta, Billie Holiday, Otis Redding — but the one who arguably shaped her style the most was the blues queen Bessie Smith.

When it came to Bessie Smith, Janis couldn’t stand that the blues legend was buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia. In August 1970, she teamed up with Juanita Green, who had done housework for Smith as a child, to pay for a proper tombstone, finally giving Smith the tribute she deserved.

Looking back, it’s clear that the fiercely intelligent Janis Joplin was often driven by a constant need to please her parents. Amy Berg’s brilliant feature-length documentary Little Girl Blue highlights this through Janis’s personal letters, which were used as source material for the film.

Joplin photographed by Jim Marshall in 1969, one year before her death / Wikipedia Commons
Many of these letters, sent back to her family in Port Arthur, Texas, reveal a persistent desire to impress and justify her choices.

”Weak as it is, I apologize for being just so plain bad in the family,” she wrote after leaving for San Francisco to chase her dreams.

Despite her rebellious path, her parents were largely supportive, though understandably worried about her drug use. In the documentary, Janis’s sister shares that their parents even questioned whether their shortcomings as parents had ”caused a calamity.”

But at least once, her parents invited friends over to their home to watch their daughter on The Ed Sullivan Show.

”Clearly, my parents were very proud of Janis. But also my parents were a member of their generation and they didn’t understand the hippie movement any more than the rest of the people in their generation. They had an honest relationship with Janis. It was no surprise to her. They had agreed several years earlier, when Janis was insistent about doing things that they didn’t think were right, that they agreed to disagree. They felt that maintaining their relationship and their closeness was more important than agreeing on some of the behavior. In this way, they could at least talk and perhaps influence. They worried about what Janis was getting into, and all parents worry about what their kids are doing,” Janis’s sister, Laura, once shared.

Inside her final hours
Unfortunately, Janis Joplin died to young. She was only 27 when she was found dead at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles in October 1970.

Janis was discovered by her road manager and close friend, John Byrne Cooke.

Apparently, Janis had spent the day in the studio and seemed happy, though the boyfriend and girlfriend she had planned to meet never showed up. At the time, she was involved with two different partners.

One was her fiancé, Berkeley student Seth Morgan, who had been trying to keep up with the whirlwind life of the now-iconic singer. The other was Peggy Caserta, with whom Janis had an on-again, off-again relationship.

Later during the day, Janis went to her room, likely injected heroin, then returned to the hotel lobby to buy cigarettes, chatting cheerfully with the night porter. She was later discovered dead in her room, still clutching the cigarettes and some change. It was later revealed that the heroin she used that night was unusually pure — and tragically, the same batch killed eight other people in Los Angeles that weekend.

Janis Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean from a plane.

Janis was genuinely a grounded, down-to-earth woman who loved both her music and her fans. She wasn’t just a performer — she was the voice and soul of an entire movement, part of the audience as much as she was the entertainer, at the heart of it all. Thank you for everything, Janis.