”JANIS MARTINRock ’n’ roll was a boys club; in fact, almost exclusively a boys club. Few women could master its incendiary qualities, but Janis Martin was one of the few. RCA Victor, which had just signed Elvis, signed Janis too, and placed her in the middle of its promotional vortex. She was on ’American Bandstand,’ ’The Tonight Show,’ ’The Today Show,’ ’The Grand Ole Opry,’ and ’The Ozark Jubilee.’ But the hits that should by right have been hers, didn’t materialize, and Janis retired from the business. Out of music, she was unaware that her records traded hands at ever higher prices, and that collectors across two continents were wondering whatever happened to Janis Martin.Although she spent eight years in Akron, Ohio as a child, Janis Martin has always considered Virginia home. She was born in Sutherlin on March 27, 1940 into a family deeply immersed in the music business. ”I had a mother who was a show business/stage type mother,” she told journalist Bob Allen. ”Both my father and my uncle were amateur musicians, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t play or sing.” By age eleven, she was on the ’WDVA Barndance’ in Danville, Virginia, and soon graduated to the ’Old Dominion Barndance’ in Richmond. ’The Old Dominion Barndance’ was a big deal in its day, and Janis performed alongside Hawkshaw Hawkins, Jean Shepard, the Carter Sisters, Sonny James, and Martha Carson. ”I was bored with slow country songs,” she told Allen. ”I didn’t particularly care for bluegrass either. It was the black R&B that I really started to get comfortable with. I started doing Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker songs. A few Dinah Washington songs too. I more or less ended up doing rock ’n’ roll music on a country show.”Two songwriters hanging around the ’Old Dominion,’ Carl Stutz and Carl Barefoot, wrote a rockabilly novelty song, Will You, Willyum, and persuaded Janis to sing the demo. They liked what they heard and sent it to Tannen Music in New York. Nat Tannen also liked what he heard and took the demo to Steve Sholes at RCA Victor. Just weeks after Elvis Presley was signed, Janis joined him. She cut her first session in Nashville in March 1956. Sholes dubbed her ’The Female Elvis,’ a sobriquet that came with the tacit approval of Colonel Parker. Drugstore Rock ’n’ Roll dates from that first session. ”It’s real surprising,” Janis said later, ”because on my shows that I do in Europe, I always open with ’Drugstore Rock ’n’ Roll.’ Even though it was a B-side, that’s the side that took off as far as the kids in Europe are concerned. The only reason I wrote [it] is because they were just beginning to realize that artists would have more success if they could write their own songs. I wrote ’Drugstore Rock ’n’ Roll’ in about ten minutes. Everything in that song was actually the scene that was happening for us as teenagers [it was recorded three weeks short of Janis’s sixteenth birthday]. The drugstore was the only place we had to go and hang out after school. They had the jukebox and soda fountain and we’d just go and dance and have a soda, maybe order a hamburger and that was our social life.” For the second session, Steve Sholes found what was probably the first song about  Elvis, My Boy Elvis (written by two New York songwriters, Aaron Schroeder and Claude Demetrius, who would later write for the man himself). It became her third single (the second was a cover of Ooby Dooby). Ironically, ’The Female Elvis’ had just two brief encounters with the ’Male Elvis.’ ”I said hello to him backstage at a show in Danville, Virginia,” she remembered later, ”and later I ran into him in New York at RCA’s studio. He said, ’How’s it goin’?’ I said, ’Fine, how about you?’ He said, ’It’s rough!'” Rougher than she ever knew.In June 1957, Steve Sholes brought Janis to New York. Love And Kisses from that first New York session could have been a big hit, as Janis edged closer to the mainstream, but unbeknownst to anyone, she was pregnant. One of her earlier RCA singl”