Joni Mitchell
 Roberta
Joan Anderson was born on November 7th, 1943, in Fort Macleod in the
prairie province of Alberta, Canada. She was the only child of William
Anderson, a flight lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and his
wife Myrtle "Mickey" McGee, a teacher.
When the war was over, Anderson moved his family between rented rooms
in some of the satellite towns of Saskatoon, along Highway 16:
Maidstone, population 400, where his daughter used to wave at the daily
train as it passed her window, and North Battleford, where Bill managed
one of the OK Economy chain of grocery stores and Mickey taught at a
local school.
Joni was prone to illness as a child and yet proved curiously robust,
surviving appendicitis and bouts of measles, chicken pox and scarlet
fever. Then, at the age of nine, she contracted polio, a usually
crippling illness which, instead of taking her mobility, she claims gave
her the sensitivities of an artist.
In her later years at Aden Bowman High School she bought a $36
ukulele (because she didn't have quite enough money for a guitar) and
taught herself a few chords from a Pete Seeger songbook. She was soon
singing folk songs in coffee houses, and even appeared on local TV.
She
left high school at 17 without having distinguished herself academically
and began attending the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in
Calgary, with ambitions to become an illustrator. Whilst at college, she
took a shine to fellow student Brad McMath. In fact she lost her
virginity to him - and immediately fell pregnant.
Joni and Brad left Calgary and moved to Toronto, ostensibly to bring
up the child together. But in the winter of 1964, McMath decamped to
California. Joni moved to a Victorian rooming house and worked in a
local department store until she gave birth to Kelly Dale Anderson on
February 19, 1965 in a charity hospital. Two weeks later Kelly was taken
into foster care and Joni eventually reluctantly gave the child up for
adoption. It haunted her for the next three decades and surfaced
occasionally in her songs, most openly in Little Green from the 1971
album, Blue.
Joni Anderson met Chuck Mitchell only a month after Kelly was born,
when she was performing at a Toronto club called The Penny Farthing.
Chuck was a singer (several years her senior) who told her he could get
her work in the US. They began dating and married on June 19, 1965.
Three days later they performed as a duo at a club in Michigan called
The Folk Cellar.
Joni and Chuck moved to Detroit and throughout 1966 gained a strong
reputation in the folk clubs on the Philly-Detroit-Toronto circuit, and
further into the US, including Florida and a show at the Gaslight in New
York where Joan Baez saw them play and told Joni she reminded her of
Buffy St Marie.
Joni eventually left Chuck, obtained a green card to work and reside
in the US, and moved to New York. During that first summer she booked
herself gigs at an impressive string of festivals and played for the
first time at the Newport Folk Festival. Her growing reputation was also
sufficient to secure her a few shows in England that same summer. Joni
Mitchell was becoming famous.
In October 1967, at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, an
excitable young man named Elliot Roberts was transfixed by Joni's
performance. He said "I'm a personal manager and I'd kill to work
with you". She said "I'm going on the road tomorrow for three
weeks". He went along, paying for his own flight to Ann Arbor and
smoking joints with Joni at their hotel. He was hired.
The new partnership worked fast. Within five months Joni released her
self-titled debut album through Reprise Records, and people started
taking notice of the slim, pale-skinned Canadian girl. The album was
"produced" by another new partner, David
Crosby, who had also
been mesmerised by Joni's singing in a club in Coconut Grove, Florida.
In reality, Joni produced 13 albums herself (in conjunction with her
engineer Henry Lewy) while Crosby protected her from the record company.
Among the songs she has written are Both Sides Now, Chelsea Morning
and Woodstock (although she did not perform at the festival) as well as
Big Yellow Taxi which was a major hit for her.
In 2002, as she released Travelogue, a two-disc reappraisal of songs
from various points in her career, Joni announced her retirement from a
music business she declared "repugnant" and "a
cesspool". These days she concentrates on her paintings, which she
occasionally exhibits but doesn't sell.
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