March is Women's History Month. To celebrate, each weekday this month we'll be spotlighting a different artist with special coverage on air and online. For Wednesday, March 18, we're shining a light on Janis Joplin.

Janis Lyn Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1943. Her childhood wasn't easy. Janis described herself as a misfit, but she found solace in music — particularly the songs of blues artists like Bessie Smith and Leadbelly — and vowed she would become a singer.

In 1963, Janis dropped out of college and hitchhiked to San Francisco in search of a more artistic scene, but struggled to make friends and struggled with an emerging substance abuse disorder. She returned home to Texas in 1965 to get healthy again and started pursuing a serious singing career for the first time in Austin, accompanying herself with an acoustic guitar.

It didn't take long for Janis's incredible voice to draw attention, and soon a promoter connected her with the San Francisco psychedelic rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company, who recruited her to be their new lead singer. It was with Big Brother that Janis had her big breakout moment with a mesmerizing performance at the Monterey Pop Festival — which included an especially noteworthy cover of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain."

Janis Joplin became an icon of the San Francisco hippie scene that was crystalized in the Summer of Love, and by 1968, Vogue magazine had declared her "the most staggering lead woman in rock." She left Big Brother to front her own bands, but her rise to fame was filled with obstacles, heroin and alcohol addiction, and her live performances could be wildly unpredictable. But her need to express herself through her music never waned, and the ragged, harrowing sound of her voice is instantly recognizable to this day.

Tragically, Janis died of an accidental heroin overdose on Oct. 4, 1970 at the age of 27 in the midst of recording her album Pearl. The album was released posthumously and became an instant classic, holding the number one spot on the Billboard 200 for nine weeks. Since her death, Janis has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has appeared on countless lists of the greatest albums and greatest singers of all time, and inspired generations of women artists.