Me and Bobby McGee

Fred Foster, the producer and founder of Monument Records, challenged Kris Kristofferson with a title, and Kristofferson wrote the song around it. The title character was named after a studio secretary, Barbara "Bobbie" McKee. He had misheard her surname. He said he was trying to convey the despair of the last scene of Federico Fellini's La Strada, in which a broken man played by Anthony Quinn stares up at the stars from the beach and breaks down sobbing.

Roger Miller recorded it first, in May 1969, and it reached number 12 on the US country chart. Kenny Rogers and the First Edition cut it that spring too. Gordon Lightfoot's version went to number one on the Canadian country chart in 1970.

Janis Joplin recorded it nine days before she died in October 1970, for her album Pearl. Bob Neuwirth had taught it to her while Kristofferson was in Peru filming The Last Movie with Dennis Hopper. Kristofferson did not know she had recorded it until after her death, and he first heard it the day after she died. Her version topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, her only number one. It was the second posthumous number one in US chart history, after Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay".