Janis Joplin Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy on the Same Stage — Three Days After MLK Was Murdered D

Almost nobody talks about this night, April 7th, 1968, the Anderson Theater, New York City, 3 days after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. On that stage, in that theater, on that specific night, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, all of them in the same room.

3 days after, almost nobody talks about this night. This is that story. April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old. He had come to Memphis to support the city’s striking sanitation workers, black men who were fighting for the most basic recognition of their dignity as workers and as human beings.

He had been threatened hundreds of times. He had been stabbed, he had been bombed, he had been jailed. He had continued. At 6:01 in the evening, he was shot. The news traveled across America in the specific way that devastating news traveled in 1968, by telephone, by radio, by the television sets that were on in every living room.

Within hours, cities were burning. Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Louisville, the specific grief and rage of a country that had been promised something and had watched it be murdered on a motel balcony. Janis Joplin was on the last days of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s first East Coast tour.

She was 25 years old. She was in New York. Jimi Hendrix was also in New York. They received the news the way everyone received the news. To understand what April 4th, 1968 meant to the musicians who performed at the Anderson Theatre 3 days later, you have to understand what they owed.

Janis Joplin had learned everything she knew about singing from black musicians. Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, Otis Redding, Etta James, Billie Holiday, the specific tradition she had absorbed, the blues, the gospel, the specific quality of singing from the inside of pain rather than performing pain from a comfortable distance, was a black American tradition that she had entered as a white woman from Port Arthur and had been transformed by.

She knew this. She said it openly. She had put Bessie Smith’s name on a gravestone when no one else had. She had called Otis Redding one of the greatest singers alive. She had organized her entire musical identity around what black women had made possible. And Martin Luther King had spent his life fighting for the dignity of the people whose art she had spent her life absorbing.

April 4th, 1968 was personal. Not in the way it was personal for Jimi Hendrix, who was a black man and for whom the murder of the civil rights movement’s most visible leader was a different kind of wound. But personal. Someone organized the concert. The details of exactly who called whom, who reached out to which managers and agents in the 72 hours between April 4 and April 7 are not fully documented.

What is documented is the result. A benefit concert at the Anderson Theatre in New York City on the last day of Big Brother’s East Coast tour with a lineup that reads like a who’s who of the American music that existed at the exact intersection of blues and rock and soul. Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop. All of them said yes.

All of them showed up. Buddy Guy deserves a specific mention in this story. He was 26 years old, a year older than Janis. He had come from Letchworth, Louisiana, and had been a fixture on the Chicago blues scene since the late 1950s. He had played with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter, the architects of Chicago blues.

He was one of the living embodiments of the tradition that Janis had been learning from records. For Buddy Guy, April 4th, 1968 was not a distant tragedy. Martin Luther King had been marching for people like the Guy family, the black Louisianans who had lived under a specific American arrangement for generations, and for whom the civil rights movement was the most immediate political reality of their lives.

He was on that stage on April 7th carrying something that none of the white musicians on the same stage could carry in the same way. He played anyway. He played because music was what he had, and music was what this night needed, and he was one of the people who had it. What was it like to be Janis Joplin in that backstage on April 7th, 1968? She had been singing about pain and loss and the wound since Monterey.

She had been taking the specific tradition of black American blues, the music that was made from the inside of suffering, the music that said what could not otherwise be said, and she had been singing from it with everything she had. And now she was backstage at the Anderson Theater in New York, 3 days after the murder of Martin Luther King, preparing to perform for a room full of people who had come because they needed somewhere to put their grief.

The specific quality of the occasion reversed the usual dynamic of performance. Usually, a performer brings the grief and the audience receives it. Usually, Janis Joplin arrived at a stage carrying something that the crowd did not have access to. The wound, the depth, the specific willingness to go all the way down, and she gave it to them.

On April 7th, 1968, the crowd already had it. They had come in from 3 days of watching their city and their country process the murder of a man who had represented something essential. They already knew what grief felt like. They already had access to the wound. She went out to meet them where they were.

The concert itself is not well documented in the way that Monterey and Woodstock are documented. There is no film. There is no widely distributed recording. What we know is that it happened, who was there, and the specific weight of the occasion. Weight that anyone who was in that theater on that night would have felt in the first note played.

Buddy Guy played the blues the way the blues was made to be played in that moment. The tradition that had always been about finding a way to survive the unsurvivable. Richie Havens played folk that was reaching towards something. His voice, the specific instrument of someone who understood that sometimes a song is the only coherent response to incoherence.

Joni Mitchell played with the precision and intelligence she always brought. Her observation of the world turned fully toward what the world had just done. And Jimi Hendrix played. Jimi Hendrix, 25 years old, a black man from Seattle who had absorbed the blues and the soul and the gospel and had electrified it into something that nobody had heard before, played on the stage of the Anderson Theater in New York City 3 days after Martin Luther King was murdered.

The guitar said what the guitar could say. And Janis Joplin sang what Janis Joplin could sing. Both of them were 25 years old that night. Both of them would be be within 2 and a half years. Hendrix on September 18th, 1970, Joplin on October 4th, 1970, 16 days apart, both 27, both in hotels, both gone.

On April 7th, 1968, they did not know this. They were in the same backstage, in the same theater, on the same night, carrying the same occasion. They went out and they gave what they had. That is the whole story. That is also not the whole story. The whole story is that this night, this specific gathering of people on this specific occasion, for this specific reason, almost never gets discussed.

Monterey gets discussed. Woodstock gets discussed. The famous concerts, the documented performances, the moments that were filmed and photographed and written about extensively. April 7th, 1968 was not filmed. It was not photographed widely. It was the last day of Big Brother’s East Coast tour, and it was three days after an assassination, and it was a room full of the most important musicians in America giving what they had to give to a city that needed it.

And it happened. It happened in the specific way that important things sometimes happen, without enough documentation, without enough witnesses who later wrote about it, without the infrastructure of preservation that Woodstock had, it happened anyway. Janis Joplin was there. Jimi Hendrix was there. Buddy Guy was there.

They sang and played three days after Martin Luther King was killed in a theater in New York for the people who came. Here is what this story asks you. When did you show up for something that mattered? Not because it was convenient or because anyone would remember, but because it needed to happen and you were one of the people who could make it happen.

Janis Joplin was 25 years old and in the middle of a tour and she said yes to April 7th, 1968 because it was 3 days after MLK and there was a concert and she had a voice and the voice was needed. She and Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy and the others showed up. They played. Nobody filmed it. It happened anyway. That is enough. Subscribe.

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