Joni Mitchell - Early Life

Early Life

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to Bill and Myrtle (née McKee) 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 in 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 six and seven. 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 eight, Joni contracted polio during a 1951 Canadian epidemic, the same one in which singer Neil Young, then aged five 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 herself than artistic. Once she recovered, she realized she would no longer be able to compete with the fastest swimmers or runners, and as a compensation she became interested in dancing. At the age of nine she also began smoking, a lifelong habit. Mitchell's smoking has been the subject of criticism from journalists, who blame it for changes in her voice in later decades of her life, but Mitchell has denied the connection, expressing no regret for what she calls "my terrible habits."

When Mitchell was eleven 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 frontier, 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 seventh grade, 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, cliche.' '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 the 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 . 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 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 Gaugin 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 coffee house, "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, having been raised during the Great Depression, and her decision to abandon her art studies was unpopular with her family, causing friction when she returned home to see them in Saskatchewan. In the summer of 1964 at the age of 20, she told her mother that she intended to be a folk singer in Toronto, and she left Western Canada for the first time in her life, heading east for Ontario. On the three-day train ride there, Joni wrote her first song, called "Day After Day." She also stopped at the Mariposa Folk Festival to see Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Saskatchewan-born Cree folk singer who had inspired her. A year later, Joni too would play Mariposa, her first gig for a major audience, and years later, Sainte-Marie herself would cover her.