Janis Joplin nursed a lifelong affection for the blues singer Bessie Smith, who died tragically in a car accident in 1937 and lay for more than 30 years in an unmarked grave, according to The New York Times. At the time of her death, the Blues singer’s family couldn’t scrape together enough money for a more fitting monument at the Mount Lawn Cemetery.
But in August of 1970, Joplin and Juanita Green, a registered nurse from Pennsylvania, footed the bill to have a proper tombstone erected at the grave of “The Empress of the Blues.” Roughly 50 fans attended the tombstone placement ceremony where the slab featuring the inscription, “The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing,” enjoyed permanent placement. The jazz historian John Harmon wrote this epitaph, retaining fond memories from working with Bessie Smith at Columbia Studios.
As for Green, she’d made Smith’s acquaintance in the 1930s at Lincoln Theater. While Joplin never met Smith personally, the similarities between the two performers proved uncanny. In “Love, Janis,” she notes that Linda Gottfried, Joplin’s friend and roommate, believed Joplin to be the reincarnation of Smith, from her foul mouth to her penchant for eccentric clothes and sexual experimentation.
