Janis Joplin Childhood Home — Port Arthur, Texas

Janis Joplin was born on January 19, 1943, and grew up in this modest house on Procter Street in Port Arthur, a refinery town on the Gulf Coast of southeast Texas. She was an outsider from the start — a voracious reader and painter who didn't fit the mould of a small-town Texas girl in the 1950s. She was bullied relentlessly in high school for her appearance and her refusal to conform, experiences that left deep scars but also fuelled the raw emotional intensity that would define her music.

Port Arthur sat at a crossroads of musical traditions — Gulf Coast blues, Cajun music, and country. Joplin discovered Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, and Odetta through records, and began singing in local folk and blues circles while still a teenager. She performed at the Half Way House in nearby Beaumont before leaving Texas for Austin, then San Francisco, where she would find her voice with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

The Joplin family home on Procter Street is a private residence and not open to the public. The house is a simple, single-storey brick home typical of mid-century Port Arthur. The city has had a complicated relationship with its most famous daughter — for decades there was little public acknowledgement of Joplin, though a historical marker now stands near the Museum of the Gulf Coast downtown, which houses a permanent Janis Joplin exhibit with memorabilia and a replica of her psychedelic Porsche.