Joni Mitchell is a Canadian singer-songwriter.  Most people would know her from the many songs she composed, several very popular albums, or the range and clarity of her voice.  She is also a poet and a painter.  She designed or painted most of her album covers.  

Joni was born Roberta Joan Anderson in 1943.  Her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight trainer during WWII and a grocer after the war.  Her mother was a teacher.  She grew up in Alberta and Saskatchewan, primarily in small towns and the city of Saskatoon. Joni contracted polio when she was a child and was hospitalized for weeks.  She was not a very good student and was chiefly interested in music, art, dance, poetry. She studied classical piano for a time and taught herself to play ukulele and guitar. She began singing and playing at jazz and folk clubs and parks around Saskatoon when she was 18.  She studied painting in college but dropped out to pursue a career in music.  Between 1963 and 1967 Joni made her way to Calgary, Toronto, Detroit and New York City. In 1968 her first album, Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull, was released and her second album, Clouds, was released in 1969.

Clouds included “Both Sides Now” and “Chelsea Morning” and won Joni her first Grammy Award under the classification of Best Folk Performance.  Some of Joni’s other well-known songs are “The Circle Game,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” and “Woodstock.”  Many others have covered Joni’s songs.  Here is a classic and very different version of Joni singing “Woodstock” in 1970. Between 1969 and 2016, Joni was nominated for 16 Grammys and won 9. Her album Blue, released in 1971, is considered by many to be among the greatest albums. Rolling Stone said in 2020 it was number 3 of the top 500 albums and called Joni “one of the greatest songwriters ever.”

In choosing Joni as the subject of this piece, part of a series for Women’s History Month, I wanted to select an artist who affected my generation, how we saw ourselves and the world.  I also realized that it would be better to consult a woman about the women who had affected how she and other women saw themselves.  The woman I turned to was the woman I know best and the person I talk to more than anyone else, my wife, Susan Azar Porterfield.  One of my favorite poems of Susan’s is “Joni Mitchell Wisens Us Up” in her book In the Garden of Our Spines.  (The poem is below.)  She and I have discussed many times how we often don’t see possibilities that are right in front of us. It doesn’t occur to us that we could do something different. That we don’t have to do what we have always done. It takes something outside to jar us into seeing a new way.  We have to be ready and open, but it is still a shock or at least a surprise.  That surprise is what Joni was to her and, I think, to many others.