Joni Mitchell

• 1. Introduction

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  Joni Mitchell saved up to buy a single album at a bootleg price because she could not find it in Canada. The record was The Hottest New Group in Jazz by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. She later said, "I considered that album to be my Beatles. I learned every song off of it." That obsession with a hard-to-find record hints at the kind of artist she would become. She was a Canadian singer-songwriter, born on the 7th of November 1943, who emerged from the folk circuit of the 1960s and never stopped moving. Over a long career she collected eleven Grammy Awards and a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. How does a girl who taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook end up collaborating with jazz giants? Why did she place a newborn daughter for adoption, and keep that secret for nearly three decades? What pushed her to quit touring, call the music industry a "cesspool", and then return to the stage years later? The answers run through small-town Saskatchewan, a Florida nightclub, a brain aneurysm, and a living room in Laurel Canyon.

• 2. A Prairie Childhood

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  Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta, to Myrtle Marguerite McKee and William Andrew Anderson. Her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who instructed new pilots, so the family moved among bases in western Canada during World War II. Her mother was a teacher, and after the war her father worked as a grocer in Saskatchewan towns like Maidstone and North Battleford. She contracted polio at age nine and spent weeks in a hospital. Polio weakened her left hand, a fact that would quietly reshape how she played guitar for the rest of her life. The same year she fell ill, she started smoking, though she denies it ever affected her voice. At eleven she moved with her family to Saskatoon, the city she considers her hometown. She struggled in school, where her main interest was painting, and she briefly studied classical piano. One teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, pushed her toward poetry, and her first album carries a dedication to him. Her mother associated the guitar with country music and disapproved of its hillbilly associations, so the young Mitchell settled for a ukulele at first. She later taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook, then devised alternative tunings to compensate for her weakened hand. By age 18 she was widening her repertoire to favorites like Édith Piaf and Miles Davis. Her first paid performance came on the 31st of October 1962, at a Saskatoon club that featured folk and jazz acts.

• 3. The Daughter She Could Not Raise

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  In late 1964, Mitchell discovered she was pregnant by her Calgary ex-boyfriend Brad MacMath. She later wrote that he "left me three months pregnant in an attic room with no money and winter coming on and only a fireplace for heat." She gave birth to a baby girl in February 1965 and, unable to provide for her, placed the child for adoption. The girl was named Kelly Dale Anderson, later renamed Kilauren Gibb. The experience stayed private for most of her career, surfacing only in songs. She performed "Little Green" in the 1960s and recorded it for her 1971 album Blue. In "Chinese Cafe", from the 1982 album Wild Things Run Fast, she sang, "My child's a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her." The secret broke in 1993, when a roommate from her art school days sold the story of the adoption to a tabloid magazine. By then Gibb had already started searching for her biological parents, and mother and daughter met in 1997. Mitchell later said that after the reunion she lost interest in songwriting. She came to identify her daughter's birth, and her inability to care for her, as the very moment her songwriting inspiration had begun.

• 4. Becoming A Solo Artist

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  Tom Rush, a folk singer who had met Mitchell in Toronto, was impressed by her songwriting and took "Urge for Going" to the popular artist Judy Collins. Collins passed at the time, so Rush recorded it himself, and country singer George Hamilton IV later turned it into a hit. Mitchell's songs kept finding other voices first. Sainte-Marie cut "The Circle Game", Dave Van Ronk took "Both Sides Now", and Collins eventually recorded "Both Sides Now" as a top ten hit. The fact that others profited from her writing helped her sign a record deal of her own. While Mitchell was playing one night in 1967 at the Gaslight South in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was struck by her. He brought her back to Los Angeles and introduced her music to his friends. Soon she was managed by Elliot Roberts, who first saw her on the urging of Sainte-Marie, and who had a close business association with David Geffen. Crosby convinced the Reprise label to let her record a solo acoustic album without the folk-rock overdubs then in fashion, earning himself a producer's credit. In March 1968, Reprise released her debut, known as Song to a Seagull. Her second album, Clouds, followed in April 1969 and contained her own versions of "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides, Now". She designed and painted the covers of both records herself, a blend of painting and music she carried through her career.

• 5. Blue And The Confessional Peak

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  Clouds produced Mitchell's first Grammy Award, for Best Folk Performance, in March 1970. The next month Reprise released Ladies of the Canyon, which carried the environmental anthem "Big Yellow Taxi" and its lines about paving paradise to put up a parking lot. That record became her first gold album, selling over half a million copies. Then came Blue, released in June 1971, the album that defined her reputation. David Crosby measured his own talent against hers and said, "By the time she did Blue, she was past me and rushing toward the horizon." Blue reached the top 20 of the Billboard albums chart and the British Top 3. It was rated the 30th best album in Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the 500 greatest, then rose to number 3 in the 2020 edition. In 2017 NPR ranked it number 1 on a list of the greatest albums made by women. Mitchell called it her most confessional work, recalling, "At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes." The songs ranged from simple acoustic pieces built around her voice to ones sung over her rolling piano. She would soon leave that exposed style behind for something stranger and jazzier.

• 6. The Jazz Turn

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  Court and Spark, released in January 1974, marked Mitchell's flirtation with jazz and jazz fusion. It went to number 1 on the Cashbox Album Charts and became her best-selling album, carrying the radio hits "Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris". "Help Me" became her only Top 10 single, peaking at number 7. She produced the album herself and worked with the L.A. Express, which she called her first real backing group. Her voice began shifting from mezzo-soprano to a wide-ranging contralto around 1975. Her compositions grew more harmonically and rhythmically complex as she melded jazz with rock, R&B, classical music, and non-Western beats. Starting in the mid-1970s she worked with jazz musicians including Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny. On 1976's Hejira, composed largely while she traveled by car, Pastorius played bass on songs like "Coyote" and the title track. She said of it, "I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me." The most consequential of these jazz alliances came when the bandleader Charles Mingus contacted her. He had heard her orchestrated song "Paprika Plains" and asked her to collaborate. Mingus died in 1979 before the project was finished, and she completed the tracks herself, releasing the album Mingus in June 1979 to a poor reception.

• 7. Protest And Withdrawal

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  On the cover of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, released in December 1977, Mitchell wore blackface and a pimp outfit. She called the alter ego "Art Nouveau" and has been widely criticized for the choice as racist, while consistently defending it as late as 2017. In 2024 the cover art on streaming services and physical reissues was quietly changed to a photo of her face inside the open mouth of a wolflike dog, with no announcement or stated reason. Her later records carried sharper political edges. The song "Tax Free", on 1985's Dog Eat Dog, lambasted televangelists and what she saw as a drift to the religious right. She wrote, "The churches came after me, they attacked me." On 1988's Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, the song "Lakota" took on the Wounded Knee incident, the deadly battle between Native American activists and the FBI. By the 1990s critics noticed a real change in her voice; she explained, "I'd go to hit a note and there was nothing there." She attributed the change to vocal nodules, a compressed larynx, and the lingering effects of polio rather than her smoking. In a 2002 interview she called the music industry a "cesspool" and said Travelogue would be her final album. After signing with Starbucks' Hear Music label, she released Shine in September 2007, her highest US chart position since Hejira. In 2009 she said she had the skin condition Morgellons and would leave the industry to give credibility to fellow sufferers.

• 8. The Return Of Music

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  In March 2015, Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm rupture that required physical therapy and daily rehabilitation. David Crosby said in November 2018 that she was learning to walk again. Her recovery was helped by a tradition that began in 2017, after a visit from her old friend Eric Andersen inspired her to host monthly music sessions at her home in Laurel Canyon. The sessions became known as "Joni Jams", organized by Brandi Carlile, who recruited musicians. Over the years Elton John, Paul McCartney, Bonnie Raitt, Harry Styles, and Herbie Hancock came to play in her living room. The music raised her spirits, and she began to sing again and relearn the guitar. On the 24th of July 2022 she appeared unannounced at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, where she had first played in 1967. Supported by a group of well-wisher musicians, she joined a 13-song set, her first public performance in nine years. She said afterward, "I was delighted and honoured. It gave me the bug for it." That recording won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2024. Her 2023 headline concert at the Gorge Amphitheatre drew a capacity audience of 27,000 and ran nearly three hours, her first headline show in 23 years. On the 1st of February 2026 she wore an ICE OUT pin to the Grammy Awards in protest of recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions, and that night won a Grammy for Best Historical Album for Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 4: The Asylum Years.