Within a six month period - December 1995 to May 1996 - Canada’s Joni MitchelI won the Century Award, Billboard’s highest honour for creative achievement; two Grammys for her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo; a Gemini for a best performance; and shared what many consider the Nobel prize of music, the $150,000 Polar Prize awarded by the Swedish Academy of Music. Later in 1996, she received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and was headlined in Billboard Magazine when Melinda Newman wrote, “Few artists would have the sense of humour, much less the humility, to release an album of misses alongside hits but that is exactly what Joni Mitchell did with the release by Reprise of Joni Mitchell Hits and Joni Mitchell Misses.”

The “Hits” included her singing such well-known numbers as “Free Man in Paris” and “Help Me,” as well as songs composed and sung by both her and some of her colleagues. Judy Collins’ version of “Clouds” sold more than a million records as did “Woodstock” recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Still others who have sung her “Hit” compositions include Tom Rush, Bing Crosby, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Ian and Sylvia, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Her “Misses,” Joni told the Billboard writer, “are songs of experience as opposed to the younger songs of the Hits.” They are from some of the 17 albums Ms. Mitchell has produced in a career that began more than 30 years ago in the coffee houses of Toronto’s then hippy haven, Yorkville.

Born at Fort MacLeod, Alberta, in 1943, she was christened Roberta Joan by her parents, William and Myrtle Anderson. An ex-RCAF officer, William, a grocery store manager, moved the family to Saskatoon where Joni took piano lessons and taught herself to play the guitar from an instruction book while attending public and high school. After a year at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, she opted to try being a folk singer in Toronto and, on the trip east in 1966, wrote her first song, “Day After Day” — a ballad set, according to a 1976 article in Current Biography, to “the rhythmic clacking of the train wheels.”

To earn the $140 fee required for the musicians’ union, she worked as a department store sales clerk before appearing at the Riverboat and Penny Farthing coffeehouses. There she met a young Detroit singer, Chuck Mitchell, whom she married, and moved to Detroit to sing at coffeehouses there and in Southern Ontario before they broke up in 1966.

Joni moved to New York and finally made her first record, “I Had a King,” in January 1968. Months later Reprise issued an LP of her songs that reflected her life experiences. It didn’t hit the pop charts and was faulted in one review for several technical flaws, but it recognized Joni’s talent by concluding, “Any one of these frailties would ruin an album of a lesser talent.”
 

When Joni Mitchell performed at the Mariposa Folk Festival in the late 1960s, as viewed here, little did she realize that some 30 years later she would win a Grammy in 1994 for Best Pop Album, Turbulent Indigo, win Billboard Magazine’s “Century Award” 1996, win the National Academy of Songwriters Lifetime Achievement Award 1996, win the 1996 Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, and be inducted in 1997 into both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as well as the Songwriters Hall of Fame. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star]

In 1969, under the guidance of a new manager and a guitar teacher “who taught her the complicated method of guitar tuning which makes her sound unique,” Joni wrote and recorded “Clouds” and “Chelsea Morning” on an LP that won a Grammy for the best folk performance of 1969. A tour of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada followed, a London critic writing, “I believe that Joni Mitchell is better able to describe ...what it means to be alive today than any other singer.”

Ms. Mitchell wrote and made an LP a year between 1970 and 1975, most of them selling in excess of 500,000 copies. Her hits included, “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” “Women of Heat and Fire,” the playful “Turn Me On (I’m a Radio),” “Help Me,” and “Raised on Robbery” — all of them songs that won her rave reviews in such publications as the New Yorker and High Fidelity which concluded one article with the observation, “No one else comes near her or even tries.”

Her popularity as a recording star also prompted tours in 1972 and 1974, the latter with the five-piece rock band, L.A. Express. There was disappointment, however, when she appeared in outdoor arenas such as Wembly Stadium, London, the criticism being “that it was impossible to concentrate on her lyrics.” When she sang at the smaller acoustically excellent Avery Fisher Hall in New York, however, she was called “folk song’s Ethel Merman.”

The 1975 album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, jolted both fans and critics as it departed from the songs based on personal experience but expressed, instead, songs of a social activist — a move that lost some of her old fans and much of her air time on radio. Her next 11 albums in fact were largely overlooked by radio as she created such critical numbers as “Tax Free,” an attack on TV evangelism, and “Shiny Toys,” a condemnation of consumerism in what many considered her most angry album, the 1985 Dog Eat Dog.

In 1988, Joni’s album, Chalk Marks in a Rain Storm, was much less shrill but still reflected her concern with such global issues as Vietnam and the radioactive cloud created at Chernobyl. “A lot of it is trying to be a witness to my times,” she explained at a Toronto press conference.

Like Dog Eat Dog, Chalk Marks featured a number of other artists such as Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, former Eagle Don Henley, sax player Wayne Shorter, and Billy Idol. “I cast voices just like I would cast faces for a film,” she said at the Toronto conference. Her own appearances on stage, however, virtually stopped between 1982 and 1994 due partly to health problems and a desire to be free to pursue her other major interest, painting.
 

At the time of this picture from the early 1960s, Joni Mitchell was folksinging her way through Toronto coffeehouses. When Judy Collins and Frank Sinatra began rendering her songs, especially “Both Sides Now” written in 1968, she became a top international pop singer/songwriter. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star]

When she did agree to appear at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in 1994, she made it clear there would be a number of new songs from her next album, Turbulent Indigo, explaining, “I am not a juke box. My new music is what is always most interesting to me.”

The Edmonton show was a hit as was the album – her 17th. It won a 1995 Grammy award, prompted numerous other honours in 1996, and culminated in a career climax – induction in 1997 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Joni, who moved from New York to California’s Laurel Canyon in 1968, also purchased, in 1971, a 40-acre “retreat home” near Sechelt Bay, 90 minutes away from Vancouver, B.C. She visits it several times a year. There, in fact, she is working on three books, a volume of song lyrics, a coffee table book of her painting, and an autobiography.

Mel James