When investigators entered Janis Joplin’s hotel room on the morning of October 4th, 1970, everything was exactly as she had left it. The record player was still running, the needle still on the vinyl, and when they found out whose record it was, everything they thought they knew about her final night changed completely.

The Landmark Motor Hotel, Hollywood, California, room 105, October 4th, 1970. The room was ordinary in the way that hotel rooms are always ordinary. A bed, a nightstand, a lamp still burning, a glass on the dresser with a small amount of liquid still in it. And in the corner of the room, a portable record player, the kind that folded into a suitcase, the kind that Janis Joplin carried with her everywhere she went on the road, because silence in a hotel room was something she could not tolerate, had never been able to tolerate.

The record player was still turning when the hotel clerk opened the door that morning, still turning, needle in the final groove. The soft rhythmic scratch of a record that had reached its end and was waiting, just waiting, in the way that things wait when the person who set them in motion is no longer there to stop them.

The investigator who entered first noted it in his report. Record player running, needle at end of side one. Record identified as follows. And here’s where the report pauses. Here is where the ordinary inventory of an ordinary hotel room becomes something else entirely. The record on the turntable was not Janis Joplin’s own music.

 It was not Big Brother and the Holding Company. It was not the Cosmic Blues Band. It was not anything from the world that had made her famous. The record on the turntable in room 105 of the Landmark Motor Hotel on the last night of Janis Joplin’s life was Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, dead since 1937, 33 years before that October night.

Bessie Smith, who had grown up in poverty in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who had taught herself to sing on street corners, who had become the highest-paid black entertainer in America in the 1920s, who had been turned away from a white hospital after a car accident in Mississippi in 1937, who had died from her injuries, who had been buried in an unmarked grave in Philadelphia for 33 years, because nobody had thought to mark it, until 1970, until the year Janis Joplin died, when Janis Joplin paid for the headstone herself.

That is the detail that changes everything. That is the detail that the investigators’ report does not contain, but that the people who knew Janis carried with them for the rest of their lives. Janis Joplin had learned about Bessie Smith’s unmarked grave in 1970. She had learned about it the way you learn about things that will not leave you alone, from a magazine article that someone had left in a green room somewhere on the road.

She had read it once and put it down. She had picked it up again. She had read it a second time. She had thought about it for 3 days, and then she had done something quietly and without telling anyone. She had contacted a memorial company in Philadelphia. She had arranged and paid for a proper grave marker for Bessie Smith, a woman she had never met, a woman who had been dead for 33 years, a woman whose voice had been one of the first voices Janis Joplin had ever loved.

The headstone was installed in August 1970, 2 months before Janis died. Janis never spoke about it publicly. She never mentioned it in interviews. She never used it as a story about herself. She just did it, the way you do something when you do it because it needs to be done, and not because you want credit for doing it.

The inscription on the headstone reads, “The greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing.” It was chosen by Janis. Those were her words. Now, think about that night in room 105. Think about what it means that she chose Bessie Smith, not for comfort, exactly, not for company, exactly, something more specific than either of those things.

Janis Joplin had grown up in Port Arthur, Texas, being told she was too much, too loud, too strange, too ugly, too everything. She had been voted ugliest man on campus as a joke by other students at the University of Texas. She had been mocked and excluded and told in a hundred different ways that the thing she was did not fit anywhere.

And she had found Bessie Smith, a woman who had also been too much for the world she lived in, who had also been too loud and too strange and too everything, who had also poured all of it into her voice because there was nowhere else for it to go, who had also died before the world fully understood what it had.

Janis had grown up learning to sing by listening to Bessie Smith records in her bedroom in Port Arthur, not in music school, not from a teacher, from a dead woman’s voice on a vinyl record, from someone who had figured out how to take everything the world refused to hold and turn it into something that lasted.

On the night of October 3rd, 1970, the night before she was found, Janis Joplin had been in the recording studio. She had been working on Pearl, the album that would become her masterpiece, the album that would be released 4 months after her death, the album that would go to number one and stay there. She had been in good spirits at the studio.

People who were there said she was laughing and focused and alive in the way she was alive when the music was going well. She had left the studio after midnight. She had driven back to the Landmark Motor Hotel alone. She had gone to room 105. She had poured a drink. She had opened her record player. She had chosen Bessie Smith, and she had listened.

The last thing Janis Joplin heard was the voice of the woman she had learned everything from, the woman whose grave she had quietly paid to mark 2 months before, the woman who had shown her that a voice like hers was not too much. It was exactly enough. It was more than enough. It was everything. The investigator who first noted the record player in his report retired from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1987.

In an interview he gave to a music magazine in 1995, he was asked about the most memorable details from cases he had worked over his career. He said most people expected him to talk about the famous ones, the violent ones, the ones that made headlines. But the detail that stayed with him, the one he thought about more than any other in 30 years of police work, was a record player still turning in a hotel room in Hollywood, a needle tracing the end of a Bessie Smith record.

He said, “I did not know who Bessie Smith was when I walked into that room. I had to ask someone. When they told me who she was and what she had meant to Joplin, I went home that night and I found a Bessie Smith record. I sat in my kitchen and I listened to it, and I understood something I had not understood before about what it means to love someone you never met, about what it means to be shaped by a voice that was already gone before you were old enough to know what shaped you.

” He said, “I still have that record.” He said, “I play it sometimes.” He said, “Every time I do, I think about that room, about the needle still moving, about whatever Janis Joplin was thinking while she listened, about whether she knew, about whether any of us ever know.” The headstone Janis paid for still stands in Mount Lawn Cemetery in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania.

Bessie Smith has not had an unmarked grave since August 1970, because a girl from Port Arthur, Texas, who learned to sing alone in her bedroom decided that was not acceptable, because a woman who was told her whole life she was too much understood exactly what it meant to be forgotten and refused to let it happen to someone else.

Pearl was released on February 1st, 1971. It went to number one. It stayed there for 9 weeks. The last track on the album is a song called Mercedes Benz. Janis recorded it in one take, a cappella. Just her voice. No instruments, no band, no production. Just a woman and a microphone and everything she had learned from 33 years of Bessie Smith records.

It was the last song she ever recorded. She recorded it 3 days before she died. When you listen to it, when you hear what she does with just her voice and nothing else, you are hearing what Bessie Smith gave her. You are hearing Port Arthur and loneliness and too much and not enough and the specific alchemy that turns all of that into something that outlasts everything.

The needle was still moving when they found her. It had reached the end of the record. It was tracing the silence after the last song, waiting the way music waits, the way love waits, the way the voices of the dead wait in the grooves of old vinyl for someone to put the needle down and listen.