The story behind Janis Joplin's landmark hit 'Me and Bobby McGee' Penned by Kris Kristofferson, the timeless cut is Joplin's epitaph

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In Jan. 1971 Janis Joplin's version of singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" was released as a single. The story behind the song is rather cinematic.

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In Jan. 1971 Janis Joplin's version of singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" was released as a single. The story behind the song is rather ... more Image 1 of / 21 Caption Close The story behind Janis Joplin's landmark hit 'Me and Bobby McGee' 1 / 21 Back to Gallery

On January 11, 1971 Port Arthur native Janis Joplin’s version of the Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster’s song “Me and Bobby McGee” was released as a single, just four months after she died of an accidental drug overdose.

It would become her only solo number one single soon after, released on the posthumous album "Pearl" which would go on to sell over 4 million copies. Joplin also played guitar on the single.

Singer-songwriter Kristofferson is still revered for his talent at a turn of a phrase and the way he could fuse that with hook. The story behind “Me and Bobby McGee,” which would become a Joplin classic, is actually rather cinematic.

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According to the Brownsville-born Kristofferson, the title came from producer and Monument Records founder Fred Foster who called him up one night with a title but no song. He pitched Kristofferson “Me and Bobby McKee” with the songwriter mishearing it as “McGee.” The new name stuck.

Who was Bobby McKee though?

Barbara "Bobby" McKee was a secretary at an office that Foster would visit on Nashville's Music Row. She was apparently cute enough for Foster to need to make frequent visits to.

“There was a Mickey Newbury song that was going through my mind—‘Why You Been Gone So Long?’ It had a rhythm that I really liked. I started singing in that meter,” Kristofferson told Performing Songwriter magazine in 2008.

As Kristofferson’s body of work has proven, he takes influences from all over the place, not just fellow musicians.

“For some reason, I thought of ‘La Strada,’ this Fellini film, and a scene where Anthony Quinn is going around on this motorcycle and Giulietta Masina is the feeble-minded girl with him, playing the trombone. He got to the point where he couldn’t put up with her anymore and left her by the side of the road while she was sleeping,” he said.

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“Later in the film, he sees this woman hanging out the wash and singing the melody that the girl used to play on the trombone. He asks, ‘Where did you hear that song?’ And she tells him it was this little girl who had showed up in town and nobody knew where she was from, and later she died. That night, Quinn goes to a bar and gets in a fight. He’s drunk and ends up howling at the stars on the beach.”

Kristofferson said the feeling conveyed at the end of the film informed “Bobby McGee” and its song structure. He changed the main details around to focus on a rich Americana-laden landscape but the intimate notions remained.

“The two-edged sword that freedom is. He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him. That’s where the line ‘Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose’ came from,” Kristofferson added.

Photo: Film Rise Image of Janis Joplin from the documentary "Janis: Little Girl Bllue"

The ambiguity of the name Bobby has made it easy for both male and female singers to cover it.

Joplin wasn't the first musician to record the song. Roger Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, and Kenny Rogers and The First Edition all recorded their own takes before Joplin got her hands on it.

Kristofferson didn’t hear Joplin’s version of his song until right after she died in late 1970.

“Paul Rothchild, her producer, asked me to stop by his office and listen to this thing she had cut. Afterwards, I walked all over L.A., just in tears. I couldn’t listen to the song without really breaking up,” Kristofferson said.

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He said later he had to listen to it until he was sick of it so it wouldn’t make him bust out all over again. When he sings it to this day he always thinks of Joplin.

In the years after Joplin's death a multitude of other artists would record the song including Loretta Lynn, The Grateful Dead, Olivia Newton-John, and Dolly Parton. Two of Kristofferson's Highwaymen band mates -- Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash -- would record the song too.

Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth.