She Was Just Writing a Letter to Her Mom — She Accidentally Became Part of Rock History JJ
On a summer morning in 1964 in a rented house in Santa Clara, California, a young Swedish woman sat down at a manual typewriter to write a letter to her parents back home. 15 ft away in the same room, two unknown musicians were rehearsing for a small benefit show. She wasn’t part of it. She wasn’t listening.
She had a letter to finish, but somebody had pressed record on a tape recorder, and the steady clicking of her typewriter went straight onto the tape underneath every note. That accidental sound turned an ordinary rehearsal into one of the most legendary bootleg recordings in rock history. The girl singing was Janis Joplin.
The guitarist would go on to form Jefferson Airplane, and the woman typing had no idea that her letter home was becoming permanent. Have you ever done something completely ordinary that turned out years later to be part of something enormous? Stay with me because the ending of this story will genuinely stop you.
It starts in the fall of 1962 at a hootenanny, [clears throat] an open folk music gathering at the Folk Theatre in San Jose, California. Janis Joplin had recently arrived in the Bay Area from Texas. She was 19, hungry, largely unknown, absorbing everything. Also there, a guitarist named Jorma Kaukonen, a few years older, born in Washington, D.C.
, raised partly overseas because his father worked for the State Department. He had already attended Antioch College in Ohio, where he’d fallen deeply in love with fingerpicking style acoustic guitar, and had moved west to attend the University of Santa Clara. In the Bay Area’s small folk scene, Kaukonen had quickly built a reputation in the coffee houses as a purveyor of authentic blues, and among his admirers was the transplanted Texan who shared his obsession with raw traditional African-American blues.
They recognized each other immediately, two people chasing exactly the same sound. Over the next couple of years, they collaborated occasionally around the Bay Area whenever a venue would have them. Then, on June 25th, 1964, both of them were booked to play a benefit at San Francisco’s Coffee Gallery on Grant Street, a Beat era coffee house, in a scene Kaukonen described precisely. This was beatniks.
The hippie thing hadn’t happened yet. So, Janis came down to rehearse. Kaukonen was a college senior at the time, recently married, renting a house on Fremont Street in Santa Clara with his wife Margarita, a Swedish woman he had met, of all places, in Russia the year before when his grandparents took him back to visit.
Janis arrived, they pulled out the guitar, and Jorma pressed record on his Sony reel-to-reel tape machine. Not for a record label, not for a demo. Kaukonen was blunt about this decades later. They were nowhere near record companies back then. It was just two young musicians running through songs. What that tape captured is astonishing.
Six tracks, traditional blues standards, Trouble in Mind, Long Black Train, Kansas City Blues, Hesitation Blues, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, plus an original Janis had written herself, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Just a voice and a guitar. No band, no production, no audience, no pressure. And Kaukonen’s own assessment of what he hears when he listens back is remarkable in its simplicity.
“Janis was at her best,” he added with the specific modesty of someone being honest rather than humble. “As for me, without being too self-serving, when I hear tapes from those days, I say, “I was pretty good for a young guitar player from Washington, D.C. A 21-year-old Janis Joplin, years before Big Brother, before Monterey, before any of it, channeling Bessie Smith in a living room, and underneath all of it, click, click, click, click, click.
” In the 1970s, copies of that tape started circulating among collectors as a bootleg. Nobody had an official title for it, so collectors named it after the one detail nobody could ignore, the typewriter tape. And because bootlegs travel through rumor rather than documentation, the mythology grew fast and wild. Some said the recordings were made at Jorma’s mother’s house.
Some argued about the exact date. And the most persistent legend of all, repeated for decades on record sleeves, in collector circles, and eventually all over the internet, was this: that Margarita Kaukonen was playing the typewriter deliberately as a percussion instrument, a third musician keeping time on the keys. For years, that’s what people believed they were hearing.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever heard buried in the background of a recording? An accidental sound that became part of the song. Tell me in the comments. I collect these. Eventually, someone did the obvious thing that nobody had bothered to do. They asked Jorma Kaukonen directly. His answer demolished the legend completely.
Margarita was writing a letter home to her parents in Sweden. That was it. That was the entire mystery. Kaukonen’s own words. People ask, “Was that a rhythm track?” She was just writing a letter home. “Janis and I were rehearsing, and Margarita was writing a letter home.” And then he added the line that ends the argument forever with a guitarist’s ear and a hint of amusement.
He found the idea that the typewriter was a percussion instrument somewhat laughable considering the obvious lack of observable rhythm. Eat of road war. There’s something perfect in that. For 50 years people insisted they were hearing intentional artistry and the man who was actually in the room simply pointed out that if you listen closely it isn’t even in time.
It was never music. It was a woman writing to her mother and that is exactly why it’s beautiful. What happened to everyone in that room is its own kind of story. Jorma Kaukonen would go on to co-found Jefferson Airplane one of the defining bands of the entire San Francisco explosion and later Hot Tuna. Janis Joplin within 3 years would be standing on the Monterey stage becoming the most talked about singer in America.
Two people who on that June morning were rehearsing for a coffee house benefit and then came October 4th, 1970. Kaukonen remembers exactly where he was when he learned Janis had died. He was at Winterland in San Francisco playing a show and also there that night was Carlos Santana. According to Kaukonen’s own recollection Santana turned to him and said seven words that land like a stone dropped into deep water.
Jorma, don’t let this happen to you. Read that again. This is one musician in real time on the night the news broke looking at another musician who had recorded blues songs in his living room with Janis Joplin 6 years earlier and saying plainly, please don’t be next. Jorma Kaukonen is still with us today, still performing, still teaching guitar at his ranch in Ohio well into his 80s.
Whether Santana’s warning had anything to do with that. Only he could say. The typewriter tape circulated as an underground bootleg for roughly half a century. Then finally, it was officially released, remastered, legitimate with liner notes written by Kaukonen himself. His description of what that recording actually is has stayed with me since I first read it.
This is indeed a window into a simpler time when the music truly was everything. A rehearsal nobody thought mattered. A tape recorder someone switched on out of habit. And a woman in the corner of the room writing to her mother in Sweden accidentally becoming part of rock and roll history without ever intending to play a single note.
Margarita Kaukonen has since passed away. Her letter is long gone. Her parents are long gone. Whatever she wrote that morning is lost forever. But the sound of her writing it survives permanently, officially on a record you can buy today. If stories like this, the accidents hiding inside the legends are why you’re here, subscribing takes one tap and make sure the next one finds you.
And if you know someone who’s heard of the typewriter tape but never knew the truth about the typewriter, send them this video. Then go listen for the clicking. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.
