singing in small nightclubs in Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the

streets and dives of Toronto. In 1965, she moved to the United States and began touring.

Some of her original songs were covered by notable folk singers, allowing her to sign

with Reprise Records and record her own debut album in 1968.

Settling in Southern California, Mitchell, with popular songs like "Big Yellow Taxi"

and "Woodstock", helped define an era and a generation. Her 1971 recording Blue was

rated the 30th best album ever made in Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of

All Time". Mitchell switched labels and began moving toward jazz rhythms by way of lush

pop textures on 1974's Court and Spark, her best-selling LP, featuring the radio hits

"Help Me" and "Free Man in Paris". Her wide-ranging vocals and distinctive open-tuned

guitar and piano compositions grew more harmonically and rhythmically complex as she explored jazz,

melding it with influences of rock and roll, R&B, classical music, and non-western beats.

In the late 1970s, she began working closely with noted jazz musicians, among them Jaco

Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, and Charles Mingus; the latter

asked her to collaborate on his final recordings. She turned again toward pop, embraced electronic

music, and engaged in political protest. She is the sole record producer credited on

most of her albums, including all her work in the 1970s. With roots in visual art, she

has designed her own album artwork throughout her career. A blunt critic of the music industry,

she quit touring and released her 17th, and reportedly last, album of original songs in

2007. She describes herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance".

Mitchell has deeply influenced fellow musicians in a diverse range of genres, and her work

is highly respected by critics. AllMusic said, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may

stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century",

and Rolling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever". Her lyrics are noted for

their developed poetics, addressing social and environmental ideals alongside personal

feelings of romantic longing, confusion, disillusion, and joy.

Early life Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson

on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to Bill and Myrtle Anderson. Her mother's

ancestors were Scottish and Irish; her father's were Norwegian and Sami. Her mother was a

teacher. Her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who instructed new

pilots at Fort Macleod, where the Allied forces were gathering to learn to fly. During the

war years, she moved with her parents to a number of bases in Western Canada. After the

war, her father began working as a grocer, and his work took the family to Saskatchewan,

to the towns of Maidstone and North Battleford. She later sang about her small town upbringing

in "Song for Sharon". In Maidstone, a "two-block, one church, one

hotel town", Joni's family lived without indoor plumbing and running water. Many of the other

residents were First Nations people. Canadians of European origin such as Joni's grandfather

had only begun to settle there in recent decades. The town was along the old railway, and the

line ran right behind her bedroom. She used to "sit up in bed each morning to watch the

one train that always passed daily". Joni said, "The weird thing is that years later

my parents met the conductor of that train at a party. He said: 'All I remember of your

town is a house with Christmas decorations and a kid that used to wave at me.'" Joni

loved spending time outdoors. She also said, "My mother raised me on words... Where other

parents would quote from the Bible, she would quote from Shakespeare. She was a romantic

woman. She encouraged me in all those old-fashioned things. I kept pressed-flower scrap books."

Joni's father was an amateur musician who loved swing records and played trumpet in

marching bands, and Joni would join in town parades with her father's band and other children.

Many of her childhood friends were taking music lessons, and she would tag along to

their performances, where she developed her first musical obsessions: Debussy, Ravel,

Stravinsky, Chopin and Beethoven. Much later, the first LP she saved up to buy was Rachmaninov's

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Mitchell briefly studied classical piano between the

ages of 6 and 7. She said, "I wanted to play... I wanted to do what I do now, which is to

lay my hand on it and to memorize what comes off of it and to create with it. But my music

teacher told me I played by ear which was a sin, you know, and that I would never be

able to read these pieces because I memorized things... I didn't fall into the norm for

that system, so I dropped that." At the age of 8, Joni contracted polio during

a 1951 epidemic in Canada, the same one in which singer Neil Young, then aged 5 and living

in Ontario, also contracted the virus. It was the last major epidemic in North America

before Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was successfully tested. Bedridden for weeks in hospital, Joni

became aware that she would have to move across the hall and live in an iron lung for the

remainder of her life if her condition worsened. As she later described, it was during her

time in hospital that winter that she first became interested in singing. She told the

story later:

They said I might not walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas.

I wouldn't go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real

loud... The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I

was a ham.

Before contracting polio, Mitchell had been interested in the arts, but she had been more

athletic than artistic. Once she recovered, she realized she would no longer be able to

compete with the fastest swimmers or runners, and to compensate she became interested in

dancing. At the age of 9 she began smoking, which has been a lifelong habit. Mitchell's

smoking has been the subject of criticism from journalists, who have blamed it for changes

in her voice as she has aged, but Mitchell has denied the connection, expressing no regret

for what she calls "my terrible habits". When Mitchell was 11 years old, her family

settled in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which she considers her hometown. Mitchell

had always been inspired by the beauty of the Canadian Prairies, but she had developed

into "a bad student" frustrated by the educational outlook in the provincial towns where she

grew up, and school in Saskatoon did not inspire her either. Mitchell's initially dedicated

note-taking in class would be replaced by a mess of drawings in her notebooks by year's

end, and her report cards would say, "Joan does not relate well." She said, "The way

I saw the educational system from an early age was that it taught you what to think,

not how to think. There was no liberty, really, for free thinking. You were being trained

to fit into a society where free thinking was a nuisance. I liked some of my teachers

very much, but I had no interest in their subjects. So I would appease them—I think

they perceived that I was not a dummy, although my report card didn't look like it. I would

line the math room with ink drawings and portraits of the mathematicians. I did a tree of life

for my biology teacher. I was always staying late at the school, down on my knees painting

something." Mitchell was drawn to art, but "growing up

just at the time before arts were included as a part of education... at that time I was

kind of a freak." In grade 7, she had "one radical teacher... a reverer of spirit...

He criticized my habit of copying pictures. No one else did. They praised me as a prodigy

for my technique. 'You like to paint?' he asked. I nodded. 'If you can paint with a

brush you can paint with words.' He drew out my poetry. He was a great disciplinarian in

his own punk style. We loved him... I wrote an epic poem in class – I labored to impress

him. I got it back circled in red with 'cliché, cliché.' 'White as newly fallen snow' – 'cliche';

'high upon a silver shadowed hill' – 'cliche.' At the bottom he said, 'Write about what you

know, it's more interesting.'" Mitchell talked about "going out after the rain and gathering

tadpoles in an empty mayonnaise jar", and he suggested she put her experience in writing.

Mitchell's debut album included a dedication to that teacher, "Mr. Kratzman, who taught

me to love words". Mitchell wrote poetry as well. She said, "I

was good in composition, but I wasn't good in the dissection of English... I wasn't scholastically

good in it because I didn't like to break it down and analyze it in that manner, and

I liked to speak in slang." Mitchell said, "I finally flunked out in the twelfth grade.

I went back later and picked up the subjects that I lost." She said, "My identity, since

it wasn't through the grade system, was that I was a good dancer and an artist... I made

a lot of my own clothes. I worked in ladies' wear and I modeled. I had access to sample

clothes that were too fashionable for our community... I would go hang out on the streets

dressed to the T... I hung out downtown with the Ukrainians and the Indians... When I went

back to my own neighborhood, I found that I had a provocative image. They thought I

was loose because I always liked rowdies... But there also came a stage when my friends

who were juvenile delinquents suddenly became criminals. They could go into very dull jobs

or they could go into crime. Crime is very romantic in your youth. I suddenly thought,

'Here's where the romance ends. I don't see myself in jail...'"

Mitchell loved rock and roll. She said, "When I was in my teens, rock 'n' roll was only

on the radio from 4 o'clock to 5 o'clock- after school- and two hours on Saturdays.

If you didn't have a record player and you just HAD to hear those sounds, you went where

there was a jukebox... I hung around two cafés that had jukeboxes. The AM Café was close

to my house, and the CM Café was on the other side of town and I was forbidden to go there.

They were owned by two Chinese guys- Artie Mack and Charlie Mack. You could loiter in

the booths and you could smoke there." As a teenager in the late 1950s, she said, "I

loved to dance. That was my thing. I instigated a Wednesday night dance 'cause I could hardly

make it to the weekends. For dancing, I loved Chuck Berry. Ray Charles. 'What I'd Say.'

I liked Elvis Presley. I liked the Everly Brothers. But then this thing happened. Rock

& roll went through a really dumb vanilla period. And during that period, folk music

came in to fill the hole. At that point I had friends who'd have parties and sit around

and sing Kingston Trio songs. That's when I started to sing again. That's why I bought

an instrument. To sing at those parties." Mitchell bought herself a ukulele in 1957.

She had wanted a guitar, but her mother, with rural roots herself, strongly opposed the

idea because of the "hillbilly" image that she connected with the guitar. Before rock

'n' roll, the guitar in rural Canada had been mainly used in country and western music and

was still widely associated with that genre. Mitchell eventually obtained a guitar, but

she continued to play baritone ukulele well into the early 1960s. She initially taught

herself how to play guitar out of a Pete Seeger songbook, but she never finished the book.

Joni's left hand had been weakened by polio, and some fingerings were difficult or impossible

for her to execute. As she added new folk songs to her repertoire, she began to devise

dozens of alternative tunings that allowed her to play each song. Later this improvised

approach would be "a tool to break free of standard approaches to harmony and structure"

in her own songwriting. Joni started singing with her friends at bonfires

in the "northern lakes, up around Waskesiu Lake" in the early 1960s. Eventually she got

a few gigs in coffeehouses in Saskatoon. Joni's first paid performance was on October 31,

1962, at a local club that featured folk and jazz performers. She was 18, and her record

collection at the time ran from American folk revivalists whose LPs were helping to expand

her repertoire of traditional songs, to her more personal favorites like Edith Piaf and

Miles Davis. Joni and her friends were interested in jazz. Though she never performed jazz herself

in those days, she and her friends sought out gigs by jazz musicians. Mitchell said,

"My jazz background began with one of the early Lambert, Hendricks and Ross albums...

The Hottest New Sound in Jazz [sic]. It was hard to find in Canada, so I saved up and

bought it at a bootleg price. I considered that album to be my Beatles. I learned every

song off of it, and I don't think there is another album anywhere – including my own

– on which I know every note and word of every song."

As Joni finished up high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, playing music was

a way to make some extra money, but she never intended to make a career of it. She wanted

to paint, and she left home to attend the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.

At art school, Joni Anderson excelled academically for the first time in her life. However, she

struggled with the sense that she was a poorer artist than her grades indicated. She said,

"I found that I was an honor student at art school for the same reason that I was a bad

student – an equal and opposite reason – because I had developed a lot of technical ability...

I found that I seemed to be marked for my technical ability so that in free classes

where I was really uninspired, my marks remained the same standard. Whereas people who were

great in free class, who were original and loose who didn't have the chops in a technical

class, would receive a mark that was pretty similar to their technical ability. So I became

pretty disillusioned." Mitchell was also coming to realize that her

art was out of step with trends at the time, a movement to nearly total abstraction. Influenced

by post-impressionists Van Gogh and Gauguin and by Picasso's work, she was still interested

in painting landscapes and people, representing real things she saw. Figurative artists like

herself were being directed to advertising and commercial art, which didn't at all appeal

to her. At art school, to support herself, Joni kept gigging as a folk musician on weekends,

playing at her college and at a local hotel. After a year, at age 19, she dropped out of

school and kept playing. Mitchell took a $15-a-week job in a Calgary coffeehouse, "singing long

tragic songs in a minor key". She played at The Depression! for three months in the autumn

of 1963. She also sang at hootenannies and even made appearances on some local TV and

radio shows in Calgary. Mitchell's parents valued education very highly,