“Piece Of My Heart” by Big Brother & The Holding Company

Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns wrote "Piece of My Heart" as a soul song, and Erma Franklin was the first to record it, in 1967. It took Big Brother and the Holding Company to drag it into the mainstream: they cut it for Cheap Thrills in 1968 with Janis Joplin on lead vocals, and their take turned a respectable R&B single into a much bigger hit, big enough to earn Franklin's original a belated Grammy nomination.

Joplin doesn't so much sing the thing as wrestle it to the floor, and the honors have kept piling up since. The Grammy Hall of Fame inducted this version in 1999, Rolling Stone put it at 353 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts it among the 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.