Hear a Rare First Recording of Janis Joplin’s Hit “Me and Bobby McGee,” Written by Kris Kristofferson

“You can’t think of that song with­out think­ing of Janis,” says Kris Kristof­fer­son of Janis Joplin’s raw, bit­ter­sweet, posthu­mous­ly released “Me and Bob­by McGee.” Kristof­fer­son, who wrote the song, only heard Joplin’s ver­sion after her death, when he returned to Cal­i­for­nia after play­ing the Isle of Wight in 1970. He met the pro­duc­er of Joplin’s last album, Pearl, in L.A., who told him to come to the stu­dio “to play me her record­ing of ‘Bob­by McGee.’ And it just blew me away. Just blew me away.” Above, you can hear a rare record­ing, pos­si­bly the first take, and pos­si­bly one of the ear­ly ver­sions Kristof­fer­son heard in the stu­dio.

Many peo­ple have assumed Kristof­fer­son wrote the song for Joplin, but that’s not the case: he didn’t know she was record­ing it at all. It was writ­ten, in 1969, about a woman, Bar­bara “Bob­by” McK­ee, who worked as a sec­re­tary in song­writer Fred Foster’s build­ing. Fos­ter gave Kristof­fer­son the title “Me and Bob­by McK­ee,” Kristof­fer­son mis­heard the last name, assumed it was a man, and wrote the famous lyrics, inspired not by Bar­bara but by Fed­eri­co Fellini’s La Stra­da, in which Antho­ny Quinn and Giuli­et­ta Masi­na trav­el togeth­er on a motor­cy­cle as a per­form­ing duo. (The Louisiana ref­er­ences come in because Kristof­fer­son was work­ing as a heli­copter pilot in the Gulf at the time.)

In La Stra­da, Quinn “got to the point where he couldn’t put up with [Masi­na] any­more and left her by the side of the road while she was sleep­ing,” says Kristof­fer­son. Lat­er, when he finds out she has died, he “goes to a bar and gets in a fight. He’s drunk and ends up howl­ing at the stars on the beach.” In a par­al­lel to this mourn­ful scene, Tom Brei­han at Stere­ogum describes how Kristof­fer­son, after hear­ing Joplin’s ver­sion of the song, “spent the rest of the day walk­ing around Los Ange­les, cry­ing. He prob­a­bly wasn’t alone. A lot of peo­ple prob­a­bly cried when they heard Joplin singing ‘Me and Bob­by McGee.’” A lot of peo­ple still do.

A long list of famous singers has cov­ered the song, orig­i­nal­ly record­ed by Roger Miller—just about any­one you might name in folk and coun­try. But Joplin “made it her own,” Kristof­fer­son says, and it’s no emp­ty cliché. Writ­ten as a coun­try song, Joplin doesn’t quite sing it that way, and she “doesn’t real­ly sing it as blues or psy­che­del­ic rock either,” writes Brei­han. “Instead, she just lets it rip, her phras­ing imme­di­ate and instinc­tive,” howl­ing at the stars like Antho­ny Quinn. “Joplin might’ve nev­er hitch­hiked across the coun­try with any­one named Bob­by McGee,” but she “did what great inter­preters do.” She made the song “about Janis Joplin, because that’s what Janis Joplin made it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Janis Joplin’s Final Inter­view Get Reborn as an Ani­mat­ed Car­toon

Janis Joplin’s Last TV Per­for­mance & Inter­view: The Dick Cavett Show (1970)

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness