I’m surprised nobody’s come forward in all this time. There’s got to be someone else? Anyway, want to thank you for sharing your memories, tenorcat - I enjoy hearing first person accounts of Janis’ performances. They demonstrate how important she was to her audience - how much they identified with and idolized her. Also, like reading articles and reviews from back then. Those show how significant an artist she was considered - for her music, not because she died tragically.

I have a live cd of Big Mama Thornton (The Rising Sun Collection, Just A Memory Records, 1994) where she mentions Janis before singing Ball & Chain, "We’d like to sing this song for you. I wrote this song, ladies & gentlemen in 1960 and the late and great Janis Joplin, she asked me could she do it. So I told her, yes, but I had the pleasure of putting it on record before she did. So here it is in my own way, the way I wrote it. Now, she might have done some changes, I don’t know. See, I can’t sing like nobody but me. I might do your song, but no way in the world I can do you."

Ironically, this version sounds much closer to Janis’ than the earlier one I have on Big Mama’s greatest hits (Ball N’ Chain, Arhoolie, 1989). The liner notes to that collection say, "It was a song she sang a lot in the 1960s when her career was boosted by the renewed interest in blues on the part of white audiences here and overseas. It was a song Big Mama had made up herself and she really felt it. Janis Joplin also loved it and asked Big Mama’s permission before recording ‘Ball and Chain.’ Unfortunately it was not Big Mama’s legal right to grant such permission."

The notes reveal she assigned copyright to her songs to Baytone Records. About her recording of Hound Dog, the writer strikes a different tone, "Later Elvis Presley recorded the song and made a monster hit for himself utilizing pretty much the same arrangement."