It has taken a tragedy to conjure the name of the forgotten semi-legend who lived, quietly, in our midst: Barbara Cope, known long ago as the rock 'n' roll groupie The Butter Queen.

Cope died early Sunday morning when her house, which sits not far from where she attended high school at Bryan Adams, caught fire. A neighbor managed to rescue Cope's 93-year-old mother, who remains hospitalized. Barbara did not make it: Dallas Fire-Rescue officials said her body was found near the front porch.

Even before the medical examiner confirmed her identity, word began circulating among veterans of Dallas' long-ago rock scene that The Butter Queen had been killed in the blaze. Days later, local television news noted Cope's place in the pantheon as the groupie immortalized in the Rolling Stones' song "Rip This Joint," the second track on 1972's Exile on Main St. Bawled Mick Jagger in the proto-punk rocker that served as a raging travelogue across the U.S.:

From San Jose down to Santa Fe/Kiss me quick, baby, wontcha make my day/Down to New Orleans with the Dixie Dean/Across to Dallas, Texas, with the Butter Queen

Cope's neighbors told TV reporters they had no idea. Veronica Flores, whose father Eduardo saved Cope's mother and tried to rescue Cope, said they knew her only as the kind friend for whom they were only too happy to run the occasional errand.

Barbara Cope and Joe Cocker, with whom she toured in 1970 (Barbara Cope's Facebook page)

There were groupies far more famous than Cope, among them Pamela Des Barres, who wrote books about her exploits and served as the inspiration for the Penny Lane character in Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous; and Cynthia Plaster Caster, so named for the way she immortalized her conquests. But there are many still around this city who remember Cope from way back when as a shadow in satin who followed rock stars into dressing rooms where she would show them how she'd earned her nickname.

"Everybody knew who she was," said Kirby Warnock, the former editor of Buddy magazine, which put Cope on its cover in November 1973 and referred to her as "Dallas' leading groupie." Said Warnock, "She was supposedly going to write her autobiography but never did. And it's too bad she didn't."

Cope "retired" from the rock scene 46 years ago at the age of 22, or so she told the Los Angeles Times during what she claimed was her first-ever interview. In that interview, she explained that her life changed in 1965, at a concert at Memorial Auditorium downtown.

Cope on the cover of Buddy with a member of the Moody Blues, who, the story goes, gave her the nickname Butter Queen (Courtesy Kirby Warnock)

"I didn't care about average boys," she said in June 1972. "I just wanted to meet musicians."

Fifteen years later, Oprah Winfrey asked Cope what she was hoping to find when she began the groupie's life.

"Fun, excitement," she said. "Good-looking men."

So she moved to Los Angeles to get closer to the never-ending party. She hooked up with Jimi Hendrix and went on the road with Traffic. Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant asked about her from the stage when the band played Fort Worth in 1973. She went on the road with Joe Cocker in 1970 and appears in the film made about that tour, Mad Dogs & Englishmen. Elton John is reported to have said of Cope, "I got on with her famously." The Stones wrote about her, too, though years later Keith Richards would recall more than one woman renowned for doing "loads of wonderful things with butter, apparently."

In 1987, on a show about groupies that featured Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS and Pamela Des Barres, Cope told Winfrey she'd had sex with some 2,000 musicians during her few years with backstage access. On Facebook, she once figured that by the time she was 22, she'd seen 52 American cities and 11 countries.

Barbara Cope backstage at Memorial Auditorium in 1968 (From Cope's Facebook page)

"If you were a rock star — or close to one — Barbara the Butter Queen sort of went with the territory," David Cassidy wrote in his 2007 autobiography Could It Be Forever? My Story about one long-ago tour date in Dallas. "She was legendary. ... The guys in my band and crew just gasped when they heard that Barbara the Butter Queen was actually coming to do them all."

Cope said in that Times interview she hated being called a groupie and disliked "being a freak in a circus." Cope tried even then to distance from the term, which had come to mean "a kind of mindless, sycophantic allegiance to famous men," Amanda Petrusich recently wrote in The New Yorker.

"They think, 'Ah-ha, a groupie, a camp follower,' but it isn't so," Cope said in her Los Angeles Times profile. "I'm just a friend to the rock stars. The reason I'm at the top — and, man, this is a very competitive field — is that I treat them as a friend. And I always have a lot of young girls and drinks around for them."

By the mid-1970s, Cope hadn't retired so much as retreated back to her hometown, showing up at the rock clubs like the college student wandering the hallways of her old high school. Old friends from the way-back said she still called on occasion, sometimes to ask for an old photo or to share an old story.

The one she would never tell, out loud, involved her nickname. Winfrey asked how she got the name Butter Queen. And Cope wouldn't say. Not even to Oprah.

"Those who know, know," she said, "and those who don't, wish they did."