As part of Amazon’s monthly $5 MP3 album deal for April 2012, Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits is on sale for only $5.

One of American music’s most tragic, flawed singers, Janis Joplin came out of the Billie Holiday/Big Mama Thornton school of hard knocks in the late 1960s to carve her own niche as one of the most influential singers of all time. First doing her musical turns with Big Brother and the Holding Company and then on her own with some stellar backing bands and finally stripped down, Joplin took every drop of the 1960s excess and devoured it for all it was worth.

In her short life, she managed to make some music which was at once heartbreaking and fragile, amazing and bluesy, unpredictable and memorable. Whether she’s doing the George Gershwin standard “Summertime” or “Piece of My Heart” with Big Brother or Big Mama Thornton’s aching “Ball in Chain” or her own solo material like the number one hit “Me and Bobby McGee” (released right after she died in 1970), Joplin’s body of work here on this greatest hits collection predated the bluesy voice of “sand and glue” that many who followed her took on, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Ann Wilson of Heart, and Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon among plenty others.

Browse the main sale page to see all 100 albums on sale for only $5 each in MP3 format through the end of April 2012.

Track Listing

1. Piece of My Heart
2. Summertime
3. Try
4. Cry Baby
5. Me and Bobby McGee
6. Down on Me (Live)
7. Get it While You Can
8. Bye Bye Baby
9. Move Over
10. Ball and Chain (Live)
11. Maybe
12. Mercedes Benz

Note – when you purchase MP3s through Amazon, it stores your purchases to Amazon’s Cloud Drive; from there you can stream the music right from their online player. Also, if you have a Kindle Fire, your MP3 purchases will automatically be available for you to stream on your device. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. You can download the files to your computer to load to an MP3 device and to your iTunes account if you have one. If you’d like to gift these MP3 purchases, you can – just click the “Give album or song as gift” button on the right on the product page. From there you enter the recipient’s email address and then select either specific songs to gift or the entire album.