You Asked Us

Toronto Star
March 27, 1971

Question: Could you please tell me about Joni Mitchell, the singer, and how one can get in touch with her? P.A. Robinson, Scarborough, Ont.

Answer: Joni, now 27, was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alta., moving early to Saskatoon where her mother was a schoolteacher and her father worked for a grocery chain. She started playing the ukulele as an art student in Calgary and moved to Toronto in 1964 to try the coffee-house, folk-singing circuit.

"But it was the same old story," Joni said later. "It's hard for Canadians to get work in their own country unless they have recognition outside it." She married U.S. balladeer Chuck Mitchell 36 hours after she met him, went to live with him in Detroit, learned to play guitar from a Pete Seeger record and got some singing work as a fill-in for no-shows in clubs. And wrote songs. Songs about moods, emotions, love, scenery, or a country girl's clear-eyed reaction to urban life all done with a poet's imagery and choice of words unsurpassed by any songwriter today. Joni composed and sang the title tune of the CBC's now-defunct The Way It Is, which (in 1967) gave her her first regular national audience in Canada. She waited - "because I didn't think I was ready" - before she recorded any of her songs herself. Others had no such compunction: Tom Rush, Bing Crosby, Judy Collins, Frank Sinatra, Ian and Sylvia, and Buffy Sainte-Marie have recorded her songs.

Joni made the first of her three albums (all for Reprise) in 1968, the most recent - Ladies Of The Canyon - coming out last summer. All have been big sellers throughout North America, and all are distinguished by a total lack of political protest, and by the highly personal use of details from her own life. This does not mean - despite her delicate, fluty, singing voice - that she cannot be angry. The New York cab-driver called Nathan La Franeer must have a hard time living down the song Joni wrote about him:

"He asked me for a dollar more
He cursed me to my face
He hated everyone who paid to ride
And share his common space."

But she is best known for Both Sides, Now ("It's life's illusions I recall; I really don't know life at all"), which has every appearance of being on of those classic songs that transcend both time and arbitrary musical boundaries. Her marriage to Mitchell long broken, Joni now lives in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon and has recently been linked with Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. She can be reached through Reprise Records, 4000 Warner Blvd., Burbank, Calif. 91505.