The short answer
In 1967 there was no Grammy category for rock vocal performances, by women or by men. A dedicated women’s rock vocal award arrived much later, reportedly around the start of the 1980s, and this article does not name a first winner, since the exact history of the early rock categories is easy to misstate. What can be described accurately is why rock was left out in the 1960s and what the leading women in 1967 rock were actually doing.
Why rock had no category in the 1960s
The Grammys were created in 1959 by an industry that was built around pop, jazz, classical music and show tunes. Rock and roll existed, but it was often treated as a youth fad, and the people who voted on awards were frequently older professionals in the established record business.
When the Academy did react to the new sounds, it used broad labels. Through the 1960s there were categories for “contemporary” records and performances, which were intended to cover rock and roll, rhythm and blues and the newer pop styles. A rock singer might be nominated alongside a pop one, or not at all. A category that said “rock” in its title came only after rock had become the dominant form in popular music, with the result that awards for the rock music of the 1960s were largely honoured, if at all, through other categories.
The result was a persistent gap between the music that young listeners were buying and the music that the ceremony honoured. The Beatles were an exception, since they were recognised several times, and the ceremony of early 1968 gave its top album prize to their Sgt. Pepper album. But for most rock acts, particularly new ones from San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Grammys were not yet a significant presence.
Women in 1967 rock
The year 1967 produced several of the most recognisable women in the history of rock, and none of them is known for a Grammy that year.
Grace Slick. Slick had joined Jefferson Airplane in 1966, and the band’s album Surrealistic Pillow came out in early 1967. It included “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”, both closely associated with Slick’s powerful voice, and both reached the American singles charts that year. They became defining records of the San Francisco scene.
Janis Joplin. Joplin sang with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the band’s performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967 is often cited as the moment that brought her to wide attention. The Janis Joplin story is one of rapid rise: from a regional reputation in the Bay Area to national fame within a few years, with a career that ended with her death in 1970.
Other women. Women also featured in the groups of the era, such as the Mamas and the Papas, whose harmonies were central to their sound, and in the British scene, where female singers appeared alongside the guitar bands. These women did not fit a neat “rock vocalist” label, which is another reason the category was slow to emerge.
Neither Slick nor Joplin won a Grammy in 1967. Their later recognition, as with many artists of the period, came through retrospective honours such as lifetime recognition and the Academy’s Hall of Fame for recordings, which was introduced in the 1970s to honour records of lasting significance.
When rock categories finally arrived
The Academy added rock vocal categories after rock had been the centre of pop music for many years. The women’s rock vocal award, in particular, appeared around the early 1980s, and it stayed in some form for roughly three decades before the early-2010s reorganisation, which reduced the number of gender-split awards.
Because the category name changed and its history is relatively short, there is room for different sources to give different answers about the earliest winners. Anyone who needs the exact name should check the Recording Academy’s own database, which records each year’s winners under the official name of the award at the time.
Why this matters for the 1967 story
The gap between rock and the Grammys is a useful reminder of how the year looked at the time. The Summer of Love and the rise of FM radio gave rock a new cultural authority, but formal recognition lagged behind. The women who sang in that scene, including Slick and Joplin, were shaping the music of 1967 without being matched to a category that described what they did.
The story of “the first woman to win” a rock vocal Grammy is therefore partly a story about how long institutions take to catch up with music. It is not a story that can be told as a single moment in 1967, and the fairest reading is that the music came first and the award followed many years later.