Joni Mitchell, the folk singer who found fame in the Sixties with songs such as Big Yellow Taxi, has finally found the child she put up for adoption more than 30 years ago, it was reported yesterday.
Last year, Mitchell, 51, began the search for the illegitimate daughter she had in 1964 when she was a 19-year-old art student struggling to make it as a singer in the cafes and clubs of her native Canada. According to the New York Post yesterday, private detectives have now traced her daughter, who is a model and said to be "a dead ringer for mum in her flower-power, hit days".
Mitchell apparently kept her pregnancy secret from her parents for some years. The child's father, a fellow art student, had left Canada and gone to California and, when she wrote and told him of the pregnancy, all he did was send her a poem.
Mitchell, now reportedly suffering a recurrence of the polio that afflicted her as a child, employed a pair of private detectives a year ago to find her daughter but they ran into the strict secrecy laws in Canada surrounding adoptive parents.
At the time, Lori Wilson, a high school friend and roommate at art school, said: "It was hell for Joni to give up the baby. She agonized over her decision for months and she grieved deeply when she did give her up. It was a time of tears and sorrow when she should have been a joyful young mother. She's carried this inside her and has been scarred and hurting for 30 years."
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