Joni Mitchell
Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell CC (née Anderson; born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and painter. She is widely considered one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time. [1] As one of the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her personal lyrics and unconventional compositions which grew to incorporate pop and jazz elements.[2] She has received many accolades, including eleven Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Rolling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever",[3] and AllMusic has stated, "Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century."[2]
Joni Mitchell
- Roberta Joan Mitchell
- Joni Anderson
- Canada
- United States
1
- Singer-songwriter
- painter
- Vocals
- guitar
- piano
- dulcimer
- 1964–2002
- 2006–2007
- 2013
- 2022–present
Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatoon and throughout western Canada, before moving on to the nightclubs of Toronto. She moved to the United States and began touring in 1965. Some of her original songs ("Urge for Going", "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", "The Circle Game") were recorded by other folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her debut album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968.[4] Settling in Southern California, Mitchell helped define an era and a generation with popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock". Her 1971 album Blue is often cited as one of the greatest albums of all time; it was rated the 30th best album ever made in Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time",[5] rising to number 3 in the 2020 edition.[6] In 2000, The New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented "turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music".[7] NPR ranked Blue number 1 on a 2017 list of Greatest Albums Made By Women.[8]
Mitchell began exploring more jazz-influenced ideas on 1974's Court and Spark, which featured the radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris"[9] and became her best-selling album. Mitchell's vocal range began to shift from mezzo-soprano to that of a wide-ranging contralto around 1975.[10][11][12] Her distinctive piano and open-tuned guitar compositions also grew more harmonically and rhythmically complex as she melded jazz with rock and roll, R&B, classical music and non-Western beats. Starting in the mid-1970s, she began working with noted jazz musicians including Jaco Pastorius, Tom Scott, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny as well as Charles Mingus, who asked her to collaborate on his final recordings.[13] She later turned to pop and electronic music and engaged in political protest. She was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.[14]
Mitchell produced or co-produced most of her albums and designed most of her own album covers, describing herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".[15] A critic of the music industry, she quit touring and released her 19th and last album of original songs in 2007. She would give occasional interviews and make appearances to speak on various causes over the next two decades, though the rupture of a brain aneurysm in 2015 led to a long period of recovery and therapy. A series of retrospective compilations were released over the time period, culminating in the Joni Mitchell Archives, a project to publish much of the unreleased material from her long career. She returned to public appearances in 2021, accepting several awards in person, including a Kennedy Center Honor.[16] Mitchell returned to live performance with an unannounced show at the June 2022 Newport Folk Festival and has made several other appearances since, including a headlining show in 2023.
Life and career[edit]
1943–1963: Early life and education[edit]
Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, the daughter of Myrtle Marguerite (née McKee) and William Andrew Anderson.[17] Her mother's ancestors were Scottish and Irish;[18] her father was from a Norwegian family that may have had some Sámi ancestry.[19][20] Her mother was a teacher. Her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who instructed new pilots at RCAF Station Fort Macleod.[21] During World War II, she moved with her parents to various bases in western Canada. After the war ended, her father worked as a grocer and her family moved to Saskatchewan, living in Maidstone and North Battleford.[22] She later sang about her small-town upbringing in several of her songs, including "Song for Sharon".[23]
Mitchell contracted polio at age nine and was hospitalized for weeks. She also started smoking that year, but denies that smoking has affected her voice.[24]
She moved with her family to Saskatoon, which she considers her hometown, at age 11.[25] Mitchell struggled at school; her main interest was painting. During this time she briefly studied classical piano.[26] She focused on her creative talent and considered a singing or dancing career for the first time.[27][28] One unconventional teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, made an impact on her, stimulating her to write poetry; her first album includes a dedication to him.[29] She dropped out of school in grade 12 (resuming her studies later) and hung out downtown with a rowdy set until she decided that she was getting too close to the criminal world.[27]
Mitchell wanted to play the guitar, but as her mother associated the instrument with country music and disapproved of its hillbilly associations,[30] she initially settled for the ukulele. Eventually she taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook.[31] Polio had weakened her left hand, so she devised alternative tunings to compensate; she later used these tunings to create nonstandard approaches to harmony and structure in her songwriting.[32]
Mitchell started singing with her friends at bonfires around Waskesiu Lake, northwest of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She widened her repertoire to include her favourite performers, such as Édith Piaf and Miles Davis, at age 18. Her first paid performance was on October 31, 1962, at a Saskatoon club that featured folk and jazz performers.[33][34] Although she never performed jazz herself in those days, Mitchell and her friends sought out gigs by jazz musicians. Mitchell said, "My jazz background began with one of the early Lambert, Hendricks and Ross albums." That album, The Hottest New Group in Jazz, was hard to find in Canada, she says, "so I saved up and bought it at a bootleg price. I considered that album to be my Beatles. I learned every song off of it, and I don't think there is another album anywhere—including my own—on which I know every note and word of every song."[35]
After graduating from high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, Mitchell took art classes at the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate with abstract expressionist painter Henry Bonli[36] and left home to attend the Alberta College of Art in Calgary for the 1963–64 school year. She felt disillusioned about the high priority given to technical skill over free-class creativity there,[26] and felt out of step with the trend toward pure abstraction and the tendency to move into commercial art. She dropped out of school after a year at age 20, a decision that greatly displeased her parents, who remembered the Great Depression and valued education highly.
1964–1967: Career beginnings, motherhood, and first marriage[edit]
She continued to play gigs as a folk musician on weekends at her college and at a local hotel. Around this time she took a $15-a-week job in a Calgary coffeehouse called The Depression Coffee House, "singing long tragic songs in a minor key". She sang at hootenannies and made appearances on local TV and radio shows in Calgary.[33] In 1964, at the age of 20, she told her mother that she intended to be a folk singer in Toronto. She left western Canada for the first time in her life, heading east for Ontario. Mitchell wrote her first song, "Day After Day", on the three-day train ride. She stopped at the Mariposa Folk Festival to see Buffy Sainte-Marie, an American folk singer[37] who had inspired her. A year later, Mitchell played Mariposa, her first gig for a major audience, and years later Sainte-Marie herself covered Mitchell's work.
Lacking the $200 needed for musicians' union fees, Mitchell performed at a few gigs at the Half Beat and the Village Corner in Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood, but she mostly played non-union gigs "in church basements and YMCA meeting halls". Rejected from major folk clubs, she resorted to busking,[33] while she "worked in the women's wear section of a downtown department store to pay the rent."[38] She lived in a rooming house, directly across the hall from poet Duke Redbird.[39] Mitchell also began to realize each city's folk scene tended to accord veteran performers the exclusive right to play their signature songs—despite not having written the songs—which Mitchell found insular, contrary to the egalitarian ideal of folk music. She found her best traditional material was already other singers' property. She said she was told "'You can't sing that. That's my song.' And I named another one. 'You can't sing that. That's my song.' This is my introduction to territorial songs. I ran into it again in Toronto." She resolved to write her own songs.[40]
Mitchell discovered that she was pregnant by her Calgary ex-boyfriend Brad MacMath in late 1964. She later wrote, "[He] left me three months pregnant in an attic room with no money and winter coming on and only a fireplace for heat. The spindles of the banister were gap-toothed—fuel for last winter's occupants."[41] She gave birth to a baby girl in February 1965. Unable to provide for her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, she placed her for adoption. The experience remained private for most of Mitchell's career, although she alluded to it in several songs, such as "Little Green", which she performed in the 1960s and recorded eventually for the 1971 album Blue. In "Chinese Cafe", from the 1982 album Wild Things Run Fast, Mitchell sang, "Your kids are coming up straight / My child's a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her." These lyrics did not receive wide attention at the time.
The existence of Mitchell's daughter was not publicly known until 1993, when a roommate from Mitchell's art school days in the 1960s sold the story of the adoption to a tabloid magazine.[42][43] By that time, Mitchell's daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, had already begun a search for her biological parents. Mitchell and her daughter met in 1997.[44] After the reunion, Mitchell said that she lost interest in songwriting, and she later identified her daughter's birth and her inability to take care of her as the moment when her songwriting inspiration had really begun.[45]
A few weeks after the birth of her daughter in February 1965, Mitchell was playing gigs again around Yorkville, often with a friend, Vicky Taylor, and was beginning to sing original material for the first time, written with her unique open tunings. In March and April she found work at the Penny Farthing, a folk club in Toronto. There she met New York City-born American folk singer Charles Scott "Chuck" Mitchell, from Michigan. Chuck was immediately attracted to her and impressed by her performance, and he told her that he could get her steady work in the coffeehouses he knew in the United States.[46]
Mitchell left Canada for the first time in late April 1965. She travelled with Chuck Mitchell to the US, where they began playing music together.[33] Joni, 21 years old, married Chuck in an official ceremony in his hometown in June 1965 and took his surname. She said, "I made my dress and bridesmaids' dresses. We had no money... I walked down the aisle brandishing my daisies."[47] Mitchell is both a Canadian and U.S. citizen.[48]
While living at the Verona apartments in Detroit's Cass Corridor, the couple regularly performed at area coffee houses, including the Chess Mate on Livernois, near Six Mile Road; the Alcove bar, near Wayne State University; the Rathskeller, a restaurant on the campus of the University of Detroit; and the Raven Gallery in Southfield.[49][50] She began playing and composing songs in alternative guitar tunings taught to her by a fellow musician, Eric Andersen, in Detroit.[51] Oscar Brand featured her several times on his CBC television program Let's Sing Out in 1965 and 1966. The marriage and partnership of Joni and Chuck Mitchell ended with their divorce in early 1967, and she moved to New York City to follow her musical path as a solo artist. She played venues up and down the East Coast, including Philadelphia, Boston, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style.
1968–1969: Breakthrough with Song to a Seagull and Clouds[edit]
Folk singer Tom Rush had met Mitchell in Toronto and was impressed with her songwriting ability. He took "Urge for Going" to the popular folk artist Judy Collins, but she was not interested in the song at the time, so Rush recorded it himself. Country singer George Hamilton IV heard Rush performing it and recorded a hit country version. Other artists who recorded Mitchell's songs in the early years were Buffy Sainte-Marie ("The Circle Game"), Dave Van Ronk ("Both Sides Now"), and eventually Judy Collins ("Both Sides Now", a top ten hit for her, and "Michael from Mountains", both included on her 1967 album Wildflowers). Collins also covered "Chelsea Morning", another recording that eclipsed Mitchell's own commercial success early on.
While Mitchell was playing one night in 1967 in the Gaslight South,[52] a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist.[53] She accompanied him back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends. Soon she was being managed by Elliot Roberts, who, after being urged by Buffy Sainte-Marie, had first seen her play in a Greenwich Village coffee house.[54] He had a close business association with David Geffen.[55] Roberts and Geffen were to have important influences on her career. Eventually she was signed to the Warners-affiliated Reprise label by talent scout Andy Wickham.[56] Crosby convinced Reprise to let Mitchell record a solo acoustic album without the folk-rock overdubs in vogue at that time, and his clout earned him a producer's credit in March 1968, when Reprise released her debut album, known either as Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull.
Mitchell toured steadily to promote the LP. The tour helped create eager anticipation for Mitchell's second LP, Clouds, which was released in April 1969. This album contained Mitchell's own versions of some of her songs already recorded and performed by other artists: "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", and "Tin Angel". The covers of both LPs, including a self-portrait on Clouds, were designed and painted by Mitchell, a blending of her painting and music that she continued throughout her career.