The Blog of Awesome Women/ Joni Mitchell: The Lady of the Canyon

Nearly every significant contemporary musician, male or female, cites Joni Mitchell as a major influence. Born in Alberta to a Royal Canadian officer and a school teacher in 1943, Roberta Joan Anderson contracted polio at nine and spent much time inside her own head during her lonely convalescence. She remained introspective throughout her life and developed a love of the arts that informs her sensibility still. Like other fifties teens, Joni danced to Elvis, Chuck Berry, and the Kingston Trio, buying a guitar to sing at Wednesday dance parties. She lost her taste for art school when the classes appeared to be assembly-line training for commercial artists. Instead she started singing in Toronto cafes where she met and married fellow singer Chuck Mitchell, a liaison that lasted for two years. Upon the breakup of their marriage, she rebounded to New York where she tried her hand at professional songwriting. She was soon successful; her material was selected by Tom Rush, Judy Collins, and Buffy Saint-Marie.

Like sister-shero Carol King in her opus Tapestry, the songwriter recorded some tracks of her own with great success. Joni Mitchell’s late sixties album Ladies of the Canyon was a moody sensation, followed immediately by Blue, Court and Spark and a subsequent catalog of impressive diversity and size. She branched out from her folk origins into jazz, blues, and electronic music, composing, singing, and recording, among other eclectic works, a vocal tribute to Charles Mingus. Joni Mitchell became a musician’s and critic’s darling (though some dismissed her more avant-garde work as self-indulgent noise) and a favorite with progressive radio listeners.

Cool and ethereally beautiful, Joni’s personal life drew much attention from the press, embarrassing her and her lovers with exposes tracking her numerous liaisons, including those with rockers Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, and horn player Tom Scott. This was echoed recently in extensive coverage of her reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption in infancy.

Joni Mitchell, who thinks of herself as a poet of the prairies, has left an indelible mark on twentieth-century music herstory. Her smart, ironic, saturnine music is played by the serious listeners and musicians of each generation that comes along. For her part, Joni prefers simplicity, clarity, truth. “For a while it was assumed that I was writing women’s music. Then men began to notice that they saw themselves in the songs, too. A good piece of art should be androgynous.”

“A man in the promotion department criticized my music for its lack of masculinity. They said I didn’t have any balls. Since when do women have balls anyway? Why do I have to be like that?”—Joni Mitchell

This bio of Joni Mitchell was taken from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.