Who recorded it first
Piece of My Heart
Not a Joplin original — a 1967 Erma Franklin single
This is a cover so overwhelming it erased a real hit: almost everyone takes ‘Piece of My Heart’ for a Janis Joplin original, but Joplin’s 1968 version with Big Brother and the Holding Company is a cover. The song was written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns and first recorded by Erma Franklin — Aretha’s older sister — in 1967 on Shout Records, where it was a genuine top-10 R&B hit. A year later Joplin’s version buried it almost entirely.
The record
Who recorded it first
How we traced it
The song was written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns and first recorded by Erma Franklin in 1967 for the Shout label Wikipedia ↗.
Franklin’s original was a real hit — a top-10 R&B single that reached No. 62 on the pop chart and drew a Grammy nomination. It was not an obscure B-side; it was a record with its own audience.
The following year Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin on lead vocal, recorded it for the No. 1 album Cheap Thrills. Joplin’s raw rock reading eclipsed the original so completely that Franklin later said she heard it on the radio and did not recognise her own song Erma Franklin ↗.
Wikipedia — the song's full historyKnow more about the original — or think we’ve got it wrong? Add a source →
Fact-check
The attribution problem
This is a cover-eclipse with a sting in it: nothing about Joplin’s record is wrong or fake, but the original it buried was itself a real hit. The only error is believing the song began in 1968 — a cover mistaken for the source.
‘It’s a Janis Joplin song’
Joplin’s 1968 version with Big Brother and the Holding Company is a cover. The song was recorded a year earlier, in 1967, by Erma Franklin the history ↗.
Erma Franklin, 1967
This was no obscure flop: Franklin’s Shout single was a top-10 R&B hit with a Grammy nomination. That a record this successful could vanish is exactly what makes the eclipse remarkable.
Jerry Ragovoy & Bert Berns
Ragovoy and Berns wrote the song; they are neither the original singer nor the famous one. Performer credit and authorship are different things, and here they belong to different people again.
Written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, first recorded by Erma Franklin in 1967, and made famous — but not originated — by Janis Joplin with Big Brother in 1968 the record ↗.
Context
Why the cover ate the original
Most cover-eclipses happen because the original never charted. ‘Piece of My Heart’ is a harder case: Erma Franklin’s 1967 version was a top-10 R&B hit, and it still lost the song. Janis Joplin’s 1968 reading was so much louder, rawer, and better distributed — riding a No. 1 album on a major label — that within a year it simply became the version.
The cruelty of it is in Franklin’s own account: she reportedly heard the cover on the radio and did not recognise the song as hers. She had made a real record, had a real hit, and then watched it be remembered as someone else’s — the original quietly overwritten while she was still around to notice.
The two records, in order
- Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns write ‘Piece of My Heart’.
- Erma Franklin records it first, 1967 (Shout) — No. 10 R&B, No. 62 pop, a Grammy nomination.
- Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin, cover it in 1968 on Cheap Thrills.
- Cheap Thrills hits No. 1; the single reaches No. 12 and becomes the definitive version.
- Franklin’s original fades from public memory — later revived when a 1992 UK re-release reached No. 9.
She had a real hit, then watched it be remembered as someone else’s.