Joni Mitchell

Rolling Stone
February 18, 1999

"I never emulated anybody. I'm driven to innovate."

Am I a god? I'm a godette. I never had a guitar god. I couldn't do what I first set out to do. I wanted to learn Cotten picking, which was kind of rudimentary. Elizabeth Cotten, who was Pete Seeger's housekeeper, a black woman, had a style of picking that every folkie could do. It was on this Pete Seeger record that started with how to tune the guitar. Most of it didn't interest me, but I did attempt to learn Cotten picking.

I never emulated anybody. My first instrument was the piano, because my first god was Rachmaninoff. By the time I was a teenager and learning guitar, I had no ambitions as a musician -- I just wanted to accompany people singing bawdy songs at weenie roasts.

I'm a painter first, and a painter -- unlike a musician -- is driven to innovate, generally speaking. You want to discover. I eventually got enough facility just by tracing the melodies in my head, but I couldn't get it out of standard tuning. Then Eric Andersen showed me banjo tuning. That's what the old blues guys did -- they tuned the guitar like a banjo. That's what Keith Richards uses. Eric showed me open G and D modal, which Neil Young uses a lot. No one was doing what I wanted to do -- I wanted to play the guitar like an orchestra.

I know I have a unique way of playing, but nobody seemed to notice. I found it kinda silly that they kept describing it as folk guitar when it was more like Duke Ellington. I always thought of the top three strings as a horn section and the bottom three as a rhythm section. It's more a frustrated attempt at orchestration.