A Friend Kept Her First-Ever Recording in a Drawer for 59 Years — Then the World Finally Heard It D

Somewhere in a drawer in Powell St. John’s home for 59 years sat a small stack of reel-to-reel tapes. On them, the very first recording ever made of Janis Joplin’s voice. Not Big Brother, not Cheap Thrills, not anything the world associates with her name. A 19-year-old college student, barefoot, playing autoharp in a beer joint in Austin, Texas, years before anyone outside that room had any idea what she would become.

Nobody heard those tapes commercially until 2021, 51 years after she died. What does it actually sound like to hear someone’s voice at the exact moment before the whole world discovered it? This is the story of the recording almost nobody knew existed and the friend who quietly kept it safe for six decades.

In 1962, Janis Joplin was a 19-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, recently transplanted from Port Arthur, restless, curious, already singing anywhere that would let her. She found her way into a loose trio called the Waller Creek Boys, named after the small creek running through the Austin campus.

The lineup: Lanny Wiggins on acoustic guitar and vocals, Powell St. John on harmonica and vocals, and Janis on autoharp and lead vocals. St. John would go on to have his own significant career, later writing songs for the 13th Floor Elevators, one of the most influential psychedelic bands in Texas music history, and playing with the band Mother Earth.

But in 1962, he was just 1/3 of a scrappy folk trio playing wherever Austin’s small counterculture scene would have them. Their regular home was Threadgill’s, the converted gas station turned tavern where Kenneth Threadgill let young musicians play for the price of a couple of free beers, passing a hat through the crowd afterward.

And one night in 1962, somebody set up a tape recorder. What that tape recorder captured was not a polished studio session. It was raw, live, unfiltered Threadgill’s, beer bottles audibly hitting the floor, doors slamming in the background, chatter and laughter bleeding into the music, Janis herself cracking jokes, and according to people who’ve heard the recordings, tossing in some choice expletives while bantering with Lanny and Powell between songs. 14 songs total.

Traditional blues and folk numbers, Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out, Kansas City Blues, Winnin’ Boy Blues, San Francisco Bay Blues, the raw material she was still learning to make her own. And underneath all that barroom noise, something unmistakable. Listeners who eventually heard these recordings decades later would describe the same reaction.

Even here, even this early, even wrapped in tavern chatter and clinking glass, her vocals sound, in the words of one review, “clear and so much older than her years, undeniable, unmistakable.” The greatness wasn’t manufactured later. It was already there at 19 in a beer joint, barely audible over the sound of a Tuesday night crowd.

The Waller Creek Boys didn’t last. Janis’s own restlessness and the pull of a bigger scene eventually took her to San Francisco, where she would find Big Brother and the Holding Company and the beginning of everything the world actually remembers. But somewhere in that transition, the tapes from Threadgill’s ended up in Powell St.

John’s possession, and there they stayed for nearly 60 years. Mighty. Think about that span of time. St. John built an entire career of his own during those decades. Songs for the 13th floor elevators, work with Mother Earth, a full musical life independent of One Night in a Texas Tavern with a teenager who happened to become one of the most famous voices in American history, and through all of it, he simply held on to the tapes, not selling them off piecemeal to collectors, not leaking them for quick attention after her death made her name valuable. Just keeping them the way you keep something you understand is important, even if you’re not entirely sure yet what to do with it. If you’ve ever kept something for decades because you knew somehow that it mattered even before you had a plan for it, I’d genuinely love to hear about it in the comments. In 2021, those tapes were finally properly released.

The Waller Creek Boys featuring Janis Joplin, the first authorized vinyl release of this material, remastered directly from Saint John’s original 1962 recordings. Five of the 14 songs had never been released in any form before. The other nine hadn’t been available commercially in nearly 50 years.

The package included a 14-page booklet with first-person anecdotes from people who were actually part of the band’s inner circle during those formative Austin years. Firsthand memories finally collected and preserved alongside the music itself. 59 years after a tape recorder was set up in the corner of a Texas beer joint, the world could finally hear exactly what it captured.

What people heard when they finally listened was not a polished artist. It was the absolute beginning, someone who hadn’t yet been shaped by San Francisco, by Big Brother, by fame, by any of it. Just a teenager with an autoharp playing traditional blues songs in a room full of beer bottles and background noise already sounding like something the world hadn’t heard before.

Every scream she would later let loose at Monterey, every note on Pearl, every performance that made critics reach for words like volcanic and unstoppable, it all started here in a recording almost nobody heard for 59 years kept safe by a friend who understood long before the rest of the world caught up that some things are worth holding on to.

If this story changed the way you think about where her voice actually began, that’s exactly what this channel exists to find and subscribing means you won’t miss the next one. And if you know someone who’s never heard Janis Joplin’s very first recording, send them this video. Then go find those tapes for yourselves.

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