Musicians - Joni Mitchell

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	Musicians - Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada), is a musician and painter.

Initially working in Western Canada and Toronto, she became associated with the burgeoning folk music scene of the mid-1960s in New York City. She then achieved her greatest fame in the early 1970s and was considered a key part of the Southern Californian folk-rock scene. Throughout the 1970s she expanded her horizons, predominantly to Pop and jazz, to become one of the most highly respected singer-songwriters of the late 20th century. Subsequently her popularity diminished, and she came to regard the music industry with some distaste.

Mitchell is also an accomplished artist; she has, through photography or painting, created the artwork for each of her albums, and has described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance."

Early life

The child of a grocer and a schoolteacher, the young Anderson grew up in Fort Macleod until the age of 9, when the family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Joni considers her hometown. She began taking piano lessons at age 7, and immediately felt the creative instinct to write her own music. Meanwhile, she excelled at art in school.

At the age of 9, she contracted polio but recovered after a stay in hospital. Her first performances were to other patients there. She also took up cigarette smoking at the same age, which may explain the unique texture to her voice, especially on her later albums. She claims to have fallen in love with smoking directly upon taking her first puffs, stating that other children in her proximity who were also smoking broke out in fits of coughing. She says it felt right to her from the very beginning.

As a teenager she taught herself guitar and ukulele and began performing at parties. This grew into playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon. After finishing high school she attended the Alberta College of Art for a year, but then left and returned to the coffeehouse scene.

Around the time when she left her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto, she became pregnant. Seeing no other alternatives, she gave her daughter up for adoption. This remained a private part of her life during the bulk of her early/progressing career.

1960s folk singer

Joni took her surname from a brief marriage to folksinger Chuck Mitchell in 1965. She performed frequently in coffee houses and folk clubs and, now creating her own material, became well known for her unique style of songwriting and her innovative guitar style. Personal and often self-consciously poetic, her songs were strengthened by her extraordinarily wide-ranging voice (with a range in pitch at one time covering over four octaves) and her unique style of guitar playing, which makes extensive use of alternative tunings.

While playing one night in a New York establishment, a young David Crosby witnessed her perform and was immediately struck by her ability and her draw as an artist. He took her under his wing and, as cited by Crosby himself, when making someone aware who had previously been unaware of Mitchell's allure, he would simply "roll them a joint", and ask that they enjoy the experience.

Much of her initial acclaim was as a result of other artists covering her songs. Her first songwriting credit to hit the charts, "Urge for Going", was a success for country singer George Hamilton IV and for folk singer Tom Rush, then many years later featured as a b-side by the Scottish band Travis. Irish singer Luka Bloom has also since recorded the song to great effect. Mitchell's own 1967 recording of the song was released on the flip side of the 1972 single "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio", but was not released on an album until the Hits compilation in 1996. In any version, "Urge for Going" was an audacious piece of songwriting, painting an extremely evocative picture of the oncoming of dread winter. Not surprisingly for someone from the Canadian plains, Mitchell had a finely developed sense for the passings of seasons and comings of age, themes that would appear on her "The Circle Game", which Tom Rush recorded a well-received take of in 1968.

Mitchell's songwriting reached its highest visibility when Judy Collins had a top-ten hit in early 1968 with "Both Sides Now". British folk rock group Fairport Convention included "Chelsea Morning" and "I Don't Know Where I Stand" on their debut album, recorded in late 1967, and the otherwise unreleased "Eastern Rain" on their second album the following year.

The songs on Mitchell's first two solo albums, Joni Mitchell (Song to a Seagull) (1968) and Clouds (1969), were archetypes of the nascent singer-songwriter movement of the time.

Early-mid 1970s success

Mitchell had already moved to California in late 1967. Now by her third album, Ladies of the Canyon (1970), maturity brought a record infused with the spirit of California life (the canyon of the title is perhaps both Topanga Canyon and Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles) as well as containing her first major hit single, the environmental "Big Yellow Taxi", and "Woodstock", about the music festival, which was later a hit for both Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Matthews Southern Comfort. Mitchell wrote the song after missing and then hearing glorified tales about Woodstock. She had cancelled her appearance at the festival on the advice of her manager for fear that she would miss a scheduled appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. She has since said the decision to miss the concert was one of the biggest regrets of her life. "For Free" is the first of Mitchell's many songs that underscore the dichotomy between the benefits of her stardom and its costs, both in terms of its pressure and of the loss of privacy and freedom it entails.

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Musicians - Joni Mitchell

Early life

1960s folk singer

Early-mid 1970s success

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