Janis Joplin's revolt against conventional femininity: A pentadic analysis of selected lyrics

San Francisco in the 1960s was the birthplace for many great bands and musicians: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and Janis Joplin. Following in the tradition of the early blues women, Janis Joplin burst onto the San Francisco music scene at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. After only a four year music career she was found dead of a heroin overdose. An examination of Janis' life, her preferred expressive genre of the blues, and the sixties counterculture scene in San Francisco provides the appropriate context for a rhetorical analysis of Joplin's original lyrics to "Turtle Blues" and "Move Over." Using Burke's pentad, the ways in which Janis revolted against conventional femininity and her perception of herself as a victim of the "scene" in which she lived are demonstrated.