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Roberta Joan ‘Joni’ Mitchell is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter. Drawing from folk, pop, rock, classical, and jazz, Mitchell’s songs often reflect on social and philosophical ideals as well as her feelings about romance, womanhood, disillusionment, and joy.

She has received many accolades, including ten Grammy Awards and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.

Rolling Stone called her ‘one of the greatest songwriters ever and AllMusic has stated, ‘When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century.

Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and throughout western Canada before moving on to the nightclubs of Toronto, Ontario. She moved to the United States and began touring in 1965.

Some of her original songs were recorded by other folk singers, allowing her to sign with Reprise Records and record her debut album, Song to a Seagull, in 1968.

Settling in Southern California, Mitchell helped define an era and a generation with popular songs like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and ‘Woodstock’.

Her 1971 album Blue is often cited as one of the best albums of all time; it was rated the 30th best album ever made in Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of the ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’, rising to number 3 in the 2020 edition.

In 2000, The New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented ‘turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music.

NPR ranked Blue number 1 on a 2017 list of Greatest Albums Made By Women. Mitchell switched labels and began exploring more jazz-influenced melodic ideas, by way of lush pop textures, on 1974’s Court and Spark, which featured the radio hits ‘Help Me’ and ‘Free Man in Paris’ and became her best-selling album.

Mitchell’s vocal range began to shift from mezzo-soprano to more of a wide-ranging contralto around 1975.

Her distinctive piano and open-tuned guitar compositions also grew more harmonically and rhythmically complex as she melded jazz with rock and roll, R&B, classical music, and non-Western beats.

In the late 1970s, she began working with noted jazz musicians including Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Pat Metheny as well as Charles Mingus who asked her to collaborate on his final recordings.

She later turned to pop and electronic music and engaged in political protest.

She was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards in 2002 and became a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2021.

Mitchell produced or co-produced most of her albums.

A critic of the music industry, she quit touring and released her 17th and last album of original songs in 2007.

Mitchell has designed most of her album covers, describing herself as a ‘painter derailed by circumstance’ Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on 07 November 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, the daughter of Myrtle Marguerite and William Andrew Anderson.

Her mother’s ancestors were Scottish and Irish: her father was from a Norwegian family that possibly had some Sami ancestry.

Her mother was a teacher, while her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who instructed new pilots at RCAF Station Fort Macleod.

She later moved with her parents to various bases in western Canada.

After World War II ended, her father worked as a grocer and her family moved to Saskatchewan, living in Maidstone and North Battleford.

She later sang about her small-town upbringing in several of her songs, including ‘Song for Sharon’ Mitchell contracted polio at age nine and was hospitalized for weeks.

She also started smoking that year but denies that smoking has affected her voice.

She moved with her family to the city of Saskatoon, which she considers her hometown, at age 11.

Mitchell struggled at school: her main interest was painting.

During this time she briefly studied classical piano.

She focused on her creative talent and considered a singing or dancing career for the first time.

One unconventional teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, made an impact on her, stimulating her to write poetry; her first album includes a dedication to him.

She dropped out of school in grade 12 and hung out downtown with a rowdy set until she decided that she was getting too close to the criminal world. Country music began to eclipse rock around this time.

Mitchell wanted to play the guitar, but since her mother disapproved of country music’s hillbilly associations, she initially settled for the ukulele.

Eventually, she taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook.

Polio had weakened her left hand, so she devised alternative tunings to compensate: she later used these tunings to create nonstandard approaches to harmony and structure in her songwriting.

Mitchell started singing with her friends at bonfires around Waskesiu Lake, northwest of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

She widened her repertoire to include her favorite performers, such as Edith Piaf and Miles Davis, at age 18.

Her first paid performance was on 31 October 1962, at a Saskatoon club that featured folk and jazz performers.

Although she never performed jazz herself in those days, Mitchell 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.’

That album, The Hottest New Group In Jazz, was hard to find in Canada, she says, ‘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.’

After graduating high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, Mitchell took art classes at the Saskatoon Technical Collegiate with abstract expressionist painter Henry Bonli and left home to attend the Alberta College of Art in Calgary for the 1963–64 school year.

She felt disillusioned about the high priority given to technical skill over free-class creativity there and felt out of step with the trend toward pure abstraction and the tendency to move into commercial art.

She dropped out of school after a year at age 20, a decision that greatly displeased her parents, who could remember the Great Depression and valued education highly.

Folk singer Tom Rush had met Mitchell in Toronto and was impressed with her songwriting ability.

He took ‘Urge for Going’ to the popular folk artist Judy Collins, but she was not interested in the song at the time, so Rush recorded it himself.

Country singer George Hamilton IV heard Rush performing it and recorded a hit country version. Other artists who recorded Mitchell’s songs in the early years were Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dave Van Ronk, and eventually Judy Collins.

Collins also covered ‘Chelsea Morning’ another recording that eclipsed Mitchell’s commercial success early on.

While Mitchell was playing one night in 1967 in the Gaslight South, a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist.

She accompanied him back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends.

Soon she was being managed by Elliot Roberts, who, after being urged by Buffy Sainte-Marie, had first seen her play in a Greenwich Village coffee house.

He had a close business association with David Geffen.

Roberts and Geffen were to have important influences on her career.

Eventually, she was signed to the Warners-affiliated Reprise label by talent scout Andy Wickham.

Crosby convinced Reprise to let Mitchell record a solo acoustic album without the folk-rock overdubs in vogue at that time, and his clout earned him a producer’s credit in March 1968, when Reprise released her debut album, known either as Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull.

Mitchell toured steadily to promote the LP.

The tour helped create eager anticipation for Mitchell’s second LP, Clouds, which was released in April 1969.

This album contained Mitchell’s versions of some of her songs already recorded and performed by other artists; ‘Chelsea Morning’ ‘Both Sides, Now’ and ‘Tin Angel’ The covers of both LPs, including a self-portrait on Clouds, were designed and painted by Mitchell, a blending of her painting and music that she continued throughout her career.

Although Mitchell said that she would no longer tour or give concerts, she made occasional public appearances to speak on environmental issues. Mitchell divides her time between her longtime home in Los Angeles and the 80-acre (32 ha) property in Sechelt, British Columbia, that she has owned since the early 1970s.

‘L.A. is my workplace’ she said in 2006, ‘B.C. is my heartbeat’ Since 2011, she said she focuses mainly on her visual art, which she does not sell and displays only on rare occasions.

In March 2015, Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm rupture, which required her to undergo physical therapy and take part in daily rehabilitation.

Mitchell made her first public appearance following the aneurysm when she attended a Chick Corea concert in Los Angeles in August 2016.

She made a few other appearances, and in November 2018 David Crosby said that she was learning to walk again.

Since 2018, Mitchell has approved several archival projects.

In September 2018, Eagle Rock Entertainment released the Murray Lerner-directed documentary Both Sides Now: Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970, which included restored video footage and previously unseen interviews with Mitchell, plus a separate program featuring the complete concert uninterrupted.

On 02 November 2018, Mitchell released an 8-LP vinyl reissue of Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to Be Danced. A limited-edition blue vinyl edition of Blue followed in January 2019.

On 07 November 2018, Mitchell attended the Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration concert in Los Angeles. To celebrate her 75th birthday, artists James Taylor, Graham Nash, Seal, Kris Kristofferson, and others interpreted songs written by Mitchell.

Selections from that night’s performances were released on DVD along with a separate CD release. A vinyl edition of the album was released for Record Store Day in April 2019.

Mitchell later attended another tribute concert Songs Are Like Tattoos, which featured Joni 75 participant Brandi Carlile performing Mitchell’s Blue album in full.

Mitchell approved Joni: The Joni Mitchell Sessions, a book of photos taken and collected by Norman Seeff, released in November 2018 Mitchell also revisited her poetry with Morning Glory on the Vine, a collection of facsimile handwritten lyrics, poetry, and artwork originally compiled in 1971 as a gift for friends and family.

The expanded and reformatted wide-release edition of Morning Glory on the Vine was published on October 22, 2019, in a standard hardcover edition as well as a limited signed edition.

In September 2020, it was announced that Mitchell and Rhino Records had created the Joni Mitchell Archives, a series of catalog releases containing material from the singer’s vaults.

The project’s first release, a five-disc collection titled Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963–1967), followed on 30 October 2020.

In April 2022 Mitchell received a Grammy Award for ‘Best Historical Album’ for this release.

She showed up personally to collect the award. On the same day, Mitchell released Early Joni  1963 and Live at Canterbury House 1967 (both culled from the 5-CD box set) as standalone vinyl releases.

A special remastered collection of Mitchell’s first four albums was released on 02 July 2021, as The Reprise Albums (1968–1971).

The collection is the first to feature a new mix of Mitchell’s 1968 debut album, overseen by Mitchell herself.

Commenting on the original mix of Song to a Seagull, Mitchell called it ‘atrocious’ and said it sounded like it ‘had been recorded under a bowl of Jello.’

On January 28, 2022, Mitchell demanded that Spotify remove her songs from its streaming service in solidarity with her long-time friend and fellow polio survivor Neil Young, who removed his tracks from the streaming platform in protest against COVID-19 misinformation on the popular Spotify-hosted podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.

She wrote on her website: ‘Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives.

I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.’ British National Health Service doctor and author Rachel Clarke tweeted; ‘Both Neil Young & Joni Mitchell.

know painfully well how much harm, suffering & avoidable death anti-vaxxers can cause.’

On 01 April 2022 Mitchell was honored as the 2022 MusiCares Person of the Year by the Recording Academy. Mitchell was present at the Awards show accepting the award personally.

On July 24, 2022, Mitchell performed several songs at the Newport Folk Festival, as part of a set billed as Brandi Carlile and Friends.

While some of Mitchell’s most popular songs were written on the piano, almost every song she composed on the guitar uses an open, or non-standard, tuning: she has written songs in some 50 tunings, playing what she has called Joni’s weird chords.

The use of alternative tunings allows guitarists to produce accompaniment with more varied and wide-ranging textures.

Her right-hand picking/strumming technique has evolved over the years from an initially intricate picking style, typified by the guitar songs on her first album, to a looser and more rhythmic style, sometimes incorporating percussive slaps.

In 1995, Mitchell’s friend Fred Walecki, proprietor of Westwood Music in Los Angeles, developed a solution to alleviate her continuing frustration with using multiple alternative tunings in live settings.

Walecki designed a Stratocaster-style guitar to function with the Roland VG-8 virtual guitar, a system capable of configuring her numerous tunings electronically.

While the guitar itself remained in standard tuning, the VG-8 encoded the pickup signals into digital signals which were then translated into the altered tunings.

This allowed Mitchell to use one guitar on stage while an off-stage tech entered the preprogrammed tuning for each song in her set.

Mitchell was highly innovative harmonically in her early work (1966–72), incorporating modality, chromaticism, and pedal points.

On her 1968 debut album Song to a Seagull, Mitchell used both quartal and quintal harmony in ‘The Dawntreader’ and quintal harmony in ‘Song to a Seagull’

In 2003, Rolling Stone named her the 72nd-greatest guitarist of all time: she was the highest-ranked woman on the list.

Mitchell has received many honors from her home country of Canada.

She was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1981 and received the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, Canada’s highest honor in the performing arts, in 1996.

Mitchell received a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2000.

In 2002 she became only the third popular Canadian singer-songwriter to be appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honor.

She received an honorary doctorate in music from McGill University in 2004.

In January 2007 she was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Saskatchewan Recording Industry Association bestowed upon Joni their Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993.

In June 2007 Canada Post featured Mitchell on a postage stamp. Mitchell has received ten Grammy Awards during her career, the first in 1969 and the most recent in 2022.

She received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002, with the citation describing her as ‘one of the most important female recording artists of the rock era’ and ‘a powerful influence on all artists who embrace diversity, imagination, and integrity.

In 1995, Mitchell received Billboard’s Century Award. In 1996, she was awarded the Polar Music Prize.

In 1997, Mitchell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but did not attend the ceremony.

In tribute to Mitchell, the TNT network presented an all-star celebration at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on 06 April 2000.

Mitchell’s songs were sung by many performers, including James Taylor, Elton John, Wynonna Judd, Bryan Adams, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Krall, and Richard Thompson.

Mitchell herself ended the evening with a rendition of ‘Both Sides, Now’ with a 70-piece orchestra. The version was featured on the soundtrack to the movie Love.

In 2008, Mitchell was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone’s ‘100 Greatest Singers list and in 2015 she was ranked ninth on their list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

On 12 February 2010, ‘Both Sides, Now’ was performed at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Vancouver.

To celebrate Mitchell’s 70th birthday, the 2013 Luminato Festival in Toronto held a set of tribute concerts entitled Joni; A Portrait in Song – A Birthday Happening Live at Massey Hall on June 18 and 19.

Performers included Rufus Wainwright, Herbie Hancock, Esperanza Spalding, and rare performances by Mitchell herself.

Owing to health problems, she could not attend the San Francisco gala in May 2015 to receive the SFJAZZ Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2018, Mitchell was honored by the city of Saskatoon, when two plaques were erected to commemorate her musical beginnings in Saskatoon.

One was installed by the Broadway Theatre beside the former Louis Riel Coffee House, where Mitchell played her first paid gig.

A second plaque was installed at River Landing, near the Remai Modern art gallery and Persephone Theatre performing arts center.

As well, the walkway along Spadina Crescent between Second and Third Avenues was formally named the Joni Mitchell Promenade.

In 2020, Mitchell received the Les Paul Award, becoming the first woman to do so. She will be honored as MusiCares Person of the Year in 2022.

In 2021, Mitchell was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album, for her Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963–1967) collection.

She won the award on 03 April 2022.

On 04 December 2021, Mitchell received the Kennedy Center Honor for a lifetime of achievement in the performing arts at the Medallion Ceremony, held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The next day, Mitchell attended the show at the Kennedy Center.

Web site: Joni Mitchell

Genres Folk: rock, jazz, pop

Instruments Vocals: guitar, piano, dulcimer

Awards List:

• 1070: Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording
• 1975: Arrangement, Instruments And Vocals, World Female Singer
• 1976: Juno Award for Best Female Artist
• 1981: Canadian Music Hall of Fame
• 1995: Billboard Music Century Award
• 1996: Pop Vocal Album, Grammy Award for Best Recording Package
• 1996, 1999: Gemini Award for Best Performance in a Performing Arts Program or Series
• 1999: Grammy Hall of Fame
• 2001: Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album, Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year
• 2002: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2008: Grammy Award for Album of the Year, Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, Juno Jack Richardson Producer of the Year Award
• 2016: Best Album Notes
• 2021: Kennedy Center Honors
• 2022: MusiCares Person of the Year, Grammy Award for Best Historical Album

Questions About Joni Mitchell

What is Joni Mitchell’s disease?

Mitchell has been plagued by health problems, including a stroke, post-polio health issues, and Morgellons disease, a rare, controversial, and mysterious condition. Worldwide, over 10,000 known cases of Morgellons disease exist, with most in the United States.

Who was the love of Joni Mitchell’s life?

Graham Nash says he still has a love for Joni Mitchell.

What happened to Joni Mitchell’s voice?

Mitchell contracted polio at age nine and was hospitalized for weeks. She also started smoking that year but denies that smoking has affected her voice. She moved with her family to the city of Saskatoon, which she considers her hometown, at age 11.

Did Joni Mitchell ever meet her daughter?

While her daughter – who was renamed Kilauren Gibb – had already tried searching for her biological parents, the pair finally met in 1997 after medical and adoption records linked them up. Kilauren also brought her son to meet Joni.

How did I get Morgellons disease?

The exact cause of the condition remains unknown.

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