Happy Birthday Janis Joplin

Today marks what would have been Janis Joplin's 78th Birthday. The first female rock star, her incredible contribution to music is still celebrated today. Revealed for the first time in the latest Genesis edition, Janis Joplin: Days and Summers, is a letter the singer sent to her family on her birthday 53 years ago.

The letter shows the huge impact Joplin was having on the music scene in 1968, with Rolling Stone referring to her as 'possibly the best female voice of a generation.' At the young age of 25, the magnitude of Joplin's talent was already well recognised. In the letter, she writes that she spent her birthday performing in a club in LA and was delighted to share champagne and cake with Peter Tork of the Monkees after the show. She moves on to 'career news', revealing that Big Brother are close to signing with Columbia Records, and comments on the growing publicity that she and the band are receiving, including a feature in Harper's Bazaar, where she would feature alongside singer-songwriter Grace Slick.

'We're getting an incredible amount of national press now and more to come. I just did a thing for Eye magazine, a hip young adult magazine put out by Harper's Bazaar which will be out in March or April. An article on Grace Slick (of the Jefferson Airplane) & I with full-page color photos of both of us, so things look good. Very good.' - Janis Joplin

Fascinating letters such as this are to accompany the publication of Janis Joplin's previously unseen scrapbook: a personal record of her meteoric rise to fame and the Sixties counterculture in which she played a pivotal role. Janis Joplin: Days and Summers is available to pre-order now.