Van Morrison Rejected It Erma Franklin Recorded It Bert Berns Died Before Hearing Janis Sing It d

You know the song. Everyone knows the song. Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin, 1968, Cheap Thrills, number one. The voice that tears the room apart, Sam Andrews’ distorted guitar, the specific rawness of a performance that sounds like it could not have been contained by a studio and barely was.

You know that version, almost everyone does. What almost no one knows is the true story of how that song came to exist. The songwriter who died before he heard it, the woman who recorded it first and didn’t recognize her own song when it came back to her on the radio. The musician who refused it, the chain of events that had to happen exactly as it did for Janis Joplin to stand at that microphone. This is that story.

Jerry Ragavoy and Bert Berns wrote Piece of My Heart in 1967. Bert Berns was one of the most gifted and least celebrated figures in American pop music. He had written Twist and Shout. Yes, that Twist and Shout, the one the Beatles covered. He had written Here Comes the Night for Van Morrison.

He had written Hang On Sloopy. He was a hitmaker of the first order, a man who understood what made a song work in the specific physical way that only the best songwriters do. In 1967, he had his own label, Shout Records, and he was producing a young Irish singer named Van Morrison who had just released his debut album and was the most promising new voice in rock music.

Berns brought Van Morrison the new song he had written with Ragavoy. Morrison listened. He said no. He wanted to do his own material. He was done covering other people’s songs. The song Berns was offering him was good, but it wasn’t his. He declined. Bert Berns needed another singer. He found one in Detroit.

Irma Franklin was 23 years old in 1967. She had grown up singing gospel in her father’s church, Reverend C.L. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, one of the most famous black churches in America. She had started singing professionally as a teenager. Her younger sister was Aretha Franklin. This matters. This has always mattered.

Irma Franklin’s career existed in the shadow of her sister’s from the beginning. Aretha had released Respect in 1967, the year Irma was recording Piece of My Heart. Aretha was becoming the queen of soul. Irma was talented, deeply talented, but the world had already decided which Franklin sister it was going to pay attention to.

Irma recorded Piece of My Heart in August 1967. Burns produced it. Her version was a soul song in the classic tradition, warm, controlled, the voice doing what trained gospel-influenced singers do with emotion, which is contain it and release it in measured doses. It was beautiful. It was professional. It reached number 10 on the R&B chart.

It was her biggest hit, and then Bert Berns died. December 30, 1967, Bert Berns had a heart attack. He was 38 years old. He died without knowing that his song was about to become one of the most famous recordings in rock history. He died without hearing what Janis Joplin was going to do with the thing he had built.

The writer of Piece of My Heart never heard Janis Joplin sing it. This is one of the specific cruelties that history contains. The person who makes something not living to see what it becomes. Burns had tried to get the song to Van Morrison. Morrison had said no. Irma Franklin had recorded it and had a modest hit.

And then Burns was gone, and the song existed in the world, and what happened next was not something he could have predicted. Big Brother and the Holding Company were recording Cheap Thrills in 1968, the album that would become their masterpiece. The album that would go to number one, the album with the R.

Crumb cover that everyone recognized. Someone brought Piece of My Heart to the session. Janis heard it, and she took it, not covered it, took it. The way certain singers take a song and make the question of who wrote it feel almost irrelevant. Not through theft, but through transformation so complete that the song becomes a new thing.

Sam Andrews’ guitar in the Big Brother version is distorted and violent in a way that has nothing to do with Erma Franklin’s soul arrangement. The tempo is different, the feeling is different, the voice is different in the most fundamental sense. Where Erma Franklin controlled her emotion, Janis Joplin released hers without restraint, without safety, without the distance that performance usually provides.

The two versions of Piece of My Heart are so different that they might as well be different songs, which is exactly what Erma Franklin discovered. Erma Franklin was at home when she heard Janis Joplin’s version on the radio. She did not immediately recognize it. This is documented. She has said so.

The song she had recorded, the song she knew from the inside, from the sessions with Bert Berns, from the specific way her voice had moved through those chord changes, came back to her from a radio speaker transformed beyond recognition. She had to listen for a while before she understood what she was hearing.

Her song returned to her as a different song. The specific experience of having your work transformed so completely that you become an audience for it. Cheap Thrills went to number one in August 1968. Piece of My Heart became one of the defining recordings of the era. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. It was on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

It is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 songs that shaped rock and roll. Irma Franklin’s version is remembered by music historians and collectors. It is not what most people hear when they hear the song. She continued her career. She sang backup on some of Aretha’s recordings.

She ran a child care agency in Detroit called Boysville. She lived a full life that was not defined only by the shadow she lived under. She died of cancer in 2002. She was 63 years old. Her Grammy nomination for Piece of My Heart Best Female R&B Vocal Performance went to her sister Aretha for Chain of Fools. Even that final recognition was taken by the shadow.

Here is what this story is actually about. It is about the chain of decisions and accidents and deaths that have to align for a great recording to exist. Van Morrison says no. Bert Berns finds Irma Franklin. Irma records the song and has a hit. Bert Berns dies. The song exists in the world orphaned from its creator. Big Brother hears it.

Janis claims it. The transformation happens. Remove one link from that chain and the song you know does not exist. If Van Morrison had said yes, he records it. No Irma version, probably no Janis version. If Bert Berns doesn’t find Irma, the song waits for someone else. Maybe it never reaches Janis.

If Janis hears it and passes as Morrison passed, the song remains Irma’s modest hit and nothing more. Every great recording is a chain of accidents and choices that could have gone differently at any point. Piece of My Heart’s chain runs through a songwriter who died too young, a talented woman who never got the recognition she deserved, and a voice from Port Arthur, Texas, that transformed a soul song into something that has been on the radio for 55 years.

Erma Franklin recorded it first. She heard it come back to her unrecognizable. The song outlived everyone who touched it. It is still playing. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.