Released by Rhino Records in 2009 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the most significant weekend in rock history, Woodstock - 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm is a monumental, staggering 6-CD box set widely heralded as the definitive audio document of the festival. Meticulously compiled and researched by producers Andy Zax, Mason Williams, and Cheryl Pawleski, this sprawling anthology presents the historic 1969 performances almost entirely in their original, unedited chronological sequence. Moving past the highly doctored and studio-overdubbed versions found on original soundtrack releases, engineers Dave Schultz and Andy Zax extracted these pristine, raw, and high-fidelity tracks directly from the multi-track field tapes. From Richie Havens' opening acoustic stomp to Jimi Hendrix's incendiary closing notes, the box set spans iconic sets by Santana, Janis Joplin, Sly & The Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Interspersed with authentic, legendary stage announcements by Chip Monck, John Morris, and Wavy Gravy, this pristine digital archive, complete with a massive accompanying book and full scans, offers listeners a vivid, front-row seat to the actual history, mud, and magic of Woodstock.

Big Brother & the Holding Company is the debut studio album by American rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin, their lead singer. Recorded during three days in December 1966 for Mainstream Records, it was released on August 23, 1967, shortly after the band's major success at the Monterey Pop Festival. Columbia Records took over the band's contract and re-released the album, adding two extra tracks, and putting Joplin's name on the cover. Several tracks on the album were released as singles, the most successful being "Down on Me" on its second release, in 1968. This reissue features a high-resolution digital transfer of the original album for modern listening, adding 4 bonus tracks to the original 1967 tracklisting!

This three-CD box set is the most thorough and valuable retrospective of Janis Joplin's career. Besides including all of her most essential recordings with and without Big Brother & the Holding Company, this 49-song package features quite a few enticing rarities; 18 of the tracks were previously unissued. These include a 1962 home recording of the Joplin original "What Good Can Drinkin' Do," which marked the first time her singing was captured on tape; a pair of acoustic blues tunes from 1965 with backup guitar by future Jefferson Airplane star Jorma Kaukonen, an acoustic demo of "Me and Bobby McGee," a 1970 birthday song for John Lennon, and live performances from her appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. The real showstopper is the previously unissued, eight-minute version of "Ball and Chain" from Big Brother's first set at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival (the cut on the Monterey Pop box set is from their second set)…

A ragtag collection of odds and ends, live and studio, from both the Big Brother and solo era. The best cuts are on the Janis box in different versions, but serious fans will find some interesting items here, especially the Cheap Thrills-era outtakes and live performances; "Misery 'N," "Farewell Song," and "Catch Me Daddy" were easily good enough to have qualified for inclusion on that album.

Recorded live in San Francisco on April 12 and April 13, 1968, this set is a snapshot of the band - with fine sound - reaching the peak of their form. All of the well-known songs from their first two albums are present: "Ball and Chain," "Down on Me," "Piece of My Heart," "Summertime," "Combination of the Two," and "Light Is Faster Than Sound," for starters. A treat for fans to hear, with a 24-page booklet that has lots of comments from the band.

Columbia has managed to squeeze an impressive, perhaps excessive, number of compilations out of Janis Joplin's relatively slim body of recordings. With this two-CD set, The Essential Janis Joplin, the label's at it again, though it's a good one to get if you don't want to collect all the Joplin releases, and certainly don't want to get the expensive Joplin boxes, but want more than what fits onto a single disc. Including both solo recordings and highlights of her stint with Big Brother & the Holding Company, it has all the songs fans and critics would consider milestones in her career: "Ball and Chain" (a version recorded live in 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, not the more familiar one from Cheap Thrills), "Piece of My Heart," "Down on Me," "Summertime," "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)," "Tell Mama" (the live 1970 performance from the expanded edition of Pearl), "Get It While You Can," "Mercedes Benz," and "Me and Bobby McGee"…

In 1975 Columbia Records released this double disc, which held both treasures and frustration for the fans of Janis Joplin. The treasures were the glimpses of her live work with the Kozmic Blues Band plus a bonus LP containing 17 previously unreleased folk tracks entitled "Early Performances." The frustration lies in the big lie. In the world before DVD combined the film and the CD soundtrack, someone at Columbia had the audacity to substitute previously released material to replace some of the live performances that appeared on the film - most notably "Cry Baby" and "Piece of My Heart." It is noted on the label, but is not the kind of thing fans of soundtracks expect to see after they purchase the LP. Think anyone had the intuitive courage to take the live performance of "Mercedez Benz" from the Wicked Woman bootleg of her last show with Full Tilt Boogie from Harvard University Stadium for this set…

Not to state the obvious, but the reality is that The Pearl Sessions by Janis Joplin is primarily for completists and musical historians. That's fine; given its design and contents it appears it was meant to be. The two-disc package includes the original album and mono 45 masters of six of its tracks – including "Me & Bobby McGee," "Move Over," and "Get It While You Can." These are interesting, but they don't hold a candle to the stereo album mixes. It's the second disc that holds the fan treasures. The studio banter by Joplin, producer Paul A Rothchild, and the Full-Tilt Boogie Band is priceless. It offers proof of Joplin's exacting standards when it came to getting across the maximum emotional impact of a song, as well as her vulnerability - asking for guidance from Rothchild as to how to approach a particular take (he hands control right back to her)…

Pearl was Janis Joplin's valedictory. It was also her masterpiece.
Originally released posthumously in 1971, Pearl encapsulates Janis’s greatness. The first female superstar of the modern rock era, Janis was not only a powerhouse performer of rock and blues but also showed an innate affinity for soul, country-inflected folk and even the Great American Songbook.
This new, two-disc edition of Pearl includes nine previously unreleased selections. Disc One’s bonus tracks include the touching tribute "Pearl" composed by Full Tilt Boogie, while Disc Two chronicles Janis’s 1970 trans-Canada Festival Express tour, and is sequenced to recreate one of the spellbinding shows from that summer…

Cheap Thrills, the major-label debut of Janis Joplin, was one of the most eagerly anticipated, and one of the most successful, albums of 1968. Joplin and her band Big Brother & the Holding Company had earned extensive press notice ever since they played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, but for a year after that their only recorded work was a poorly produced, self-titled album that they'd done early in their history for Mainstream Records; and it took the band and the best legal minds at Columbia Records seven months to extricate them from their Mainstream contract, so that they could sign with Columbia. All the while, demand continued to build, and they still faced the problem of actually delivering something worthy of the press they'd been getting…

For the compilers of Time-Life Music's Singers & Songwriters series, which – more or less – chronicles the 1970s singer/songwriter movement, the 24-month period 1970-1971 marked the real birth of that trend, with the popular emergence of such defining figures as James Taylor, Carole King, Carly Simon, John Denver, and Cat Stevens, all of whom had their first big hits in the style included here.