Joni Mitchell

Fyne
June 2007

Defined by her characteristic voice, marked out by her unique song writing ability, Joni Mitchell is one of the most influential musicians of a generation, but is she also the founder of environmental music?

Born Roberta Joan Anderson on 7th November 1943, the artist we came to know as Joni Mitchell is a Canadian through and through and the family lived in many different parts of Western Canada. They settled in Saskatoon, a city Mitchell has considered to be her home town.

The young Mitchell soon stated showing her talents lay in the creative side of academic study and her flare for art soon started to show. It soon became her life long dream to become a painter, but through the influence of others, that destiny began to change. At the age of seven, she was inspired by one of her piano playing friends to take up the instrument She took to ft well and right away began experimenting with composition. Then a few years later; one of her teachers inspired her to channel her artistic talents into prose and poetry. The final piece of the jigsaw fell into place when Mitchell fell foul of the postwar polio epidemic. Her time in hospital was not only long and dull but meant the young Mitchell would be spending Christmas away from her family. Almost in protest, she would endlessly sing Christmas carols. Her vocal talents delighted those around her and led Mitchell towards a life of music.

But there was one problem. Pianos were just not practical to carry around! Unable to afford a guitar; she plumped instead for a ukulele with which she began to write songs and perform for friends and parties. Later she bought a guitar, which she learnt to play herself. Her musical career began to expand when she took up busking and performing at local coffee houses in Saskatoon, taking on the name Joni Anderson.

Her other artistic dreams were still very much alive though and Mitchell took a place on an art course at Alberta College of Art and Design. But one year in, she realised that for all her love of art, her talents lie in music. Not wanting to hoodwink herself out of a potential careen she packed up her paint brush and headed back to the Saskatoon folk scene. There, her music began to grow. Using complex picking styles and experimenting with different tunings, her music soon became known far and wide. Before long, she felt the call of bigger things and planned a move to the bright lights of Toronto.

But fate was to stand in the way. Not long after her move to Toronto, Mitchell found herself pregnant Her daughter was born in February 1965. Penniless, she struggled to support herself and her daughter. When a fellow folk musician - Chuck Mitchell- asked for her hand in marriage, Mitchell felt it was an option not to be missed and they married soon after the birth. Although he had initially agreed to take on Mitchell's daughter, something changed and only weeks after the marriage, her daughter was adopted. Her daughter and her adoption would remain a secret for many years.

In the summer of 1965, the couple moved to Detroit, but the marriage was not a happy one. Within a year and a half, the couple were filing for divorce and Mitchell was on her own again. By contrast to her personal life, which was decidedly on the rocks, her musical career was in full bloom. Her name was becoming known in the up-and-coming folk/rock scene and each performance made her more notable still. In the music scene, fellow musicians such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young were beginning to make their name also. The stage was set for a folk uprising and Mitchell was lined up ready to go.

She moved to New York to the bohemian area of Chelsea in 1967. A chance meeting with ex-boyfriend and fellow folkie David Crosby led to some pretty lucrative networking. Rather than as a performer; Mitchell began to be known as a song writer One of her first writing credits came for George Hamilton IV's single Urge for Going, a song that was covered many times, most recently by Travis as a B-side.

However writing for other people was not a long-term plan. With a voice that had a range of four octaves and a perfect guitar style for performance, Mitchell soon had her first solo album ready. Song to a Seagull, released in 1968, created the blue-print for an archetypal Mitchell sound. Lyrically, the album included her characteristic observations of the natural world, taking images and sensations from her childhood days in Canada and creating them seamlessly into the mind of the listener Nature meant a lot to Mitchell and her work certainly reflected that love.

Her second album -Clouds (1969)- was in a similar style and gained Mitchell even more popularity among the up-and-coming folk set Having moved to California in 1967, she now found herself right in the middle of the 60s hippie scene and soon made herself and essential part of it Her fame spread to the masses in 1970 with what most fans consider the magna opus - Ladies of the Canyon. From the album came two singles that marked Mitchell out as a popular artist Whilst in Hawaii, Mitchell was saddened by seeing the beautiful mountain scenery juxtaposed next to the car park below. Including a reference to the Foster Botanical Gardens nearby (literally a tree museum), she came up with the iconic environmental masterpiece Yellow Taxi. The single rose to 24 in the charts, but was later covered by many artist, most recently Amy Grant in 1995 who modernised the lyrics with Mitchell's advice and brought the song to a whole new audience. The second single which touched the imagination of the public was Woodstock. Covered later by Crosby, Stills, Young and Nash, the song ironically tells the story of the biggest contemporary music event of the 20th century, an event which Mitchell missed on the clumsy advice of her manager

With the success of her album and singles under her belt, Mitchell's fame rose and rose. In the mid 70's she departed from her highly confessional folk music style of work and sidestepped into jazz and rock for her next few albums. Stylistically, her move away from her folk roots seemed to bear fruit, although die hard fans were not always impressed by her experimental epics!

The start of the 80s saw a huge leap back to her original style, although her output was quite small. With her own record label up and running, she produced Wild Things Running in 1982, a recognizably early Mitchell style album. Her later album Dog Eat Dog in 1985 kept her name alive throughout the 80s and she closed off the decade with the collaboration album Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm (1988).

As Mitchell matured, so the music continued to kept coming. But critics began to notice a change. Mitchell's iconic voice was beginning to sound less distinctive and almost weak at times. Her long years of smoking were initially blamed, but as it turned out Mitchell was suffering from the singer's Achilles heel -nodules! Aside from the nodules on her vocal chords, Mitchell was also suffering from compressed larynx, both a possible side-effect of many years singing. But her damaged voice has not stopped the volume or quality of the material she has produced. Her status as an icon has been confirmed with the release of A Tribute to Joni Mitchell, an album of covers by stars as diverse as kd lang, Cassandra Wilson and Prince. The album contains some of Mitchell's best loved songs, all with the unique style of the artist covering them.

To find out more about the tribute album, go to http://atributetojonimitchell.com or to find out more about the woman and her work, visit her website at http://jonimitchell.com.