Joni Mitchell let her unwanted baby live and is one happy granny today.

Throughout her career Alberta-born folk singer Joni Mitchell has been as famous for her boyfriends as for her music. Former lovers include names like folk singer James Taylor, actor Warren Beatty, and, as one writer put it, two-thirds of the rock group Crosby, Stills and Nash. But her only child was born in February 1965, the product of a brief relationship with a fellow art student. Ms. Mitchell hid her pregnancy and gave up her daughter for adoption. Last fall she went public and asked the world to help her find her daughter. Two weeks ago she broke the good news. She had found her lost daughter, a Torontonian named Kilauren Gibb, who had already made her a grandmother.

A successful singing career was preordained for Ms. Mitchell when Bill Anderson and Myrtle McKee, both from musical families, met on a blind date in Regina during the Second World War. The Andersons married in 1942. On November 7, 1943 their only child, Roberta Joan Anderson, was born in southern Alberta at Fort Macleod. When "Joan," as Joni's parents called her, turned 10, the Andersons settled in Saskatoon. Now in their mid-80s they still make their home in the Bridge City.

As a girl, Ms. Mitchell sang in the United Church junior choir. But her mother says her musical interests never really took off until Grade 12. "At about 17 or 18," Mrs. Anderson recalls, "she bought herself a ukelele and started learning folk music." Ms. Mitchell attended the Alberta College of Art in Calgary. There she began playing for the crowds that filled Calgary's then-fashionable coffee houses.

Near the end of the fall term in 1964 Ms. Mitchell learned she was pregnant. The baby's father was fellow art student Brad McMath, now a portrait photographer in Toronto. Their love-child was a memento from Ms. Mitchell's first musical tour. "The two of them left Calgary that summer to sing at Toronto's exhibition," Mrs. Anderson remembers. She did not learn about the pregnancy until two years after the baby was adopted, but Mrs. Anderson is still unhappy with Mr. McMath. "He was irresponsible about the whole thing," she says. "He went to California to complete his studies." Since Ms. Mitchell's discovery of their daughter's whereabouts, Mr. McMath has told reporters that he would like to meet his daughter.

Though the pregnancy was unplanned, there was nothing casual about Ms. Mitchell's reaction to the baby she carried. "I kept trying to find some kind of circumstances where I could stay with her," Ms. Mitchell told the LOS ANGELES TIMES. To provide her child with a home, she rushed into "a marriage of convenience, at best" with American folk singer Chuck Mitchell. But "one month into the marriage [we both] chickened out," she said. Believing she had little choice, Ms. Mitchell gave up her only child. Years later, in a song called LITTLE GREEN, Ms. Mitchell confessed enigmatically that she lost her child through her immaturity. "Call her green and the winters cannot fade her/Call her green for the children who have made her."

When Ms. Mitchell got serious about finding her daughter, she found that Canada's privacy laws protecting adoption made the search almost impossible. Fortunately Kilauren was already looking for her birth mother, having only learned at age 27 that she had been adopted. Her adoptive parents, David and Ida Gibb, had not told her from fear she would feel like an outsider. After five years of searching, Kilauren was browsing Ms. Mitchell's Internet home page when evidence of their connection began mounting. She called Ms. Mitchell's agent in Vancouver, and in early March mother and daughter spoke on the phone. Less than a week later, Ms. Gibb and her four-year-old son Marlin were flying to California.

With the sexual revolution 30 years gone it is difficult to understand why a liberated "flower child" could not tell her parents that she was pregnant. But at the time, attitudes toward unwed mothers were still quite harsh. Ms. Mitchell told reporters that being pregnant and unmarried in 1964 was considered "scandalous and disgraceful. It was like you murdered somebody."

"I think she thought we would be quite disappointed," Mrs. Anderson acknowledges. "We had talked about this type of problem beforehand." Mrs. Anderson may be guilty of understatement. A friend once described her as "a nice lady, but very Calvinistic," blaming theology for what was likely a typical late-Victorian era attitude. "We were very strict about [Joan's] upbringing," Mrs. Anderson says, admitting that Joni captured one aspect of her parenting style in a song. "Going out you get the third degree/Coming in it's World War Three."

But Mrs. Anderson believes that if Joni had told her with [sic] the truth, she might have been pleasantly surprised. "In retrospect," she says, "we're sorry she had to have a baby without our support. If we had known, things would have been different." Today Mrs. Anderson is proud of her daughter for not aborting her child, which, although still criminal, was easily enough arranged. "I don't approve of abortion," she says, "and I don't think Joan felt she could deal with that either."

Ms. Mitchell describes finding her daughter as "the peak experience of my life." But the few months they spent together after Kilauren was born were fraught with fear and worry. They had "no money, no home and no job," and she did not think she could face her parents with an illegitimate child. In the end, she feels she did the right thing and is grateful to her daughter's adoptive parents. "I owe so much to them," she said. "They raised her very well."