Port Arthur’s on-again, off-again romance with Janis Joplin emerges at key dates, like Friday’s. Born Jan. 19, 1943, the rock and blues icon would have turned 75 today, something that, for her contemporaries and children of the ‘60s, is near impossible to imagine.

Born in Port Arthur, she was from this city, a graduate of Thomas Jefferson High, a one-time student at Lamar Tech, oldest child of respected and loving parents. But she was not necessarily of this city, and her relationship to Port Arthur was not affectionate. In fact, she remembered the cruelty she experienced as an outcast here.

“They laughed me out of class, out of town, out of the state,” she said candidly of her home town and, eventually, her native Texas.

As a sometimes fragile and intellectually curious young woman, she was fueled by an independent streak that caused her to find her own artistic path from her early years when she was influenced as a teen by black singers like Bessie Smith and Lead Belly.

At the University of Texas, she carried an autoharp and might break into song. She played with a folk band and was unusual enough on a campus of 20,000 that the campus newspaper ran a story about her under the headline, “She dares to be different.” Ya think?

Some two decades back, the Washington Post’s Paul Hendrickson wrote of Joplin that she was “a woman who could bellow and cry and stamp and then turn around and go achingly tender. Someone who could sing up every song any truck driver ever knew. Someone in whom there seemed so much need, which somehow she transformed to our need.”

Better yet, he compared her less to the members of the “27 club,” iconic musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and, later, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, but more to James Dean, dead at 24 in his Porsche 550 Spyder on a California highway. Dean made three major movies, yet remains emblazoned in American culture 63 years later.

Is Joplin any less alive than Dean, whose three brilliant major movie roles were “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant”? She made three principal albums during her lifetime: “Big Brother and the Holding Company,” “Cheap Thrills” and “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” Her best-selling album, “Pearl,” was released after her death.

But if a singer’s career work is limited to short years or limited releases, who wouldn’t choose to record the likes of “Down on Me” or “Piece of My Heart” or “Try”?

Nearly five decades past her death, Joplin’s artistic burst of flame is cherished by strangers who, around the world, will hold this day sacred.