Joni's introduction to the song from a 1966 club date:

I did a movie up in Canada that should be shown sometime in December maybe on channel 9 only. Channel 9 always gets sort of left-over Canadian programs so you can never be sure. But it’s for Expo 67 which if you don’t know is our big celebration up in Canada, and suddenly Canadians have become very patriotic. And they sort of… if you’re a Canadian and you’re doing something musically or artistically or something they are suddenly very proud of you and they want to show you off. So as a result I’m getting quite a bit of television work up in Canada - although they’ve ignored me for 2 years. (laughs)

And I just did a show that is probably the most patriotic of all shows because finally they’ve sort of decided a way to unify French-Canadian and English-Canadians, because you know the French-Canadians have their own TV stations and their own networks and they really don’t pay much attention to what’s going on tin the English-speaking rest of the country - they sort of are a little country within themselves.

So what they’ve done is they have a program that I was on called Mon Pays, Mes Chansons - it was directed by a Frenchman so the title’s in French – ‘My Country, My Songs’ and on each show they showcase one province, and two performers, a French-Canadian and an English-Canadian singer. The French-Canadian did his part of the show before I got there – I did the province of Alberta – and he had already left by the time we got there. I noticed on the set that they had French and English toilets (laughter) but there could have been more alarming things.

So anyway, we came to this song which is called Come to the Sunshine, and the only draggy thing was that the day I arrived it was raining and it had been raining for a week before that and so we had a little difficulty in getting the proper mood because you couldn’t really sing a song like Come to the Sunshine in the rain. It’s like in this movie tonight where they’re singing ‘in the good old summertime’ and it’s the middle of winter.

So finally, we found two hours of sunshine and we madly rushed out to this place that’s called The Big Rock, mainly because in the middle of this farmer’s field there’s a big rock that weigh 14,000 tons. It was brought down by the last glacier in that area. And it’s quite a marvelous thing because it’s right where the prairies meet the foothills and they look kind of like American mountains then there are the Canadian Rockies above that. (hoots and laughter) That’s not really true, I think there are one of two mountains in the states that are like our Rocky range (laughs). I guess I better quit while I’m ahead. (laughs) No, I’m just kidding.

But there was this big field and it kind of rolled and there was this big rock in the middle and then there were the foothills and the mountains. Well what I was supposed to do was to wade gracefully through this field of wheat and then at the end of the song turn and wade off toward the big rock which was down in the valley, see. And, the only thing was it had been raining, like I said, for several weeks. Sand although it looks very sunshiny and innocent on the surface as I walk waist-deep in wheat, every once in a while I would be neck-deep (laughter) and it wasn’t because the wheat got longer it was because the soil got squishier (laughs) so it took about four takes to get me walking on an even keel because I’d keep falling off into pits and quicksand and things like that.

The song goes like this…