Avenger of the Week | Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell during the Court and Spark tour on March 5, 1974 at the Anaheim Convention Center. Photo credit: ultomatt [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr.

Joni Mitchell, the iconic folk, rock, and jazz singer-songwriter who’s been a trailblazer for women in her industry and whose voice and music instantly resonate with more than a generation, is our Avenger of the Week.

Mitchell, whose 1971 album Blue came in at number one on NPR’s “The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women” list and was 30th among the top albums by anyone in Rolling Stone’s “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time”, will be honored with a lifetime achievement award from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in December. She already has a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 

Trade ad for Joni Mitchell's album The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Photo credit: Asylum Records [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

In a music industry that was even more male-dominated than today, Mitchell steered her course according to her own vision starting in the late 1960s and 1970s. She wrote her own songs and was the sole producer credited on most of her 17 albums. Describing herself as “a painter derailed by circumstance”, she also designed every one of her album covers. From the beginning, she insisted on complete artistic control.

“All my battles were with male egos. I’m just looking for equality, not to dominate. But I want to be able to control my own vision,” she said.

Mitchell’s poetic, intimate, and introspective lyrics spoke of social and environmental ideals along with feelings of loss, romantic longing, confusion, disillusion, and joy. This year’s 50th anniversary of her 1971 breakthrough album Blue was widely celebrated with tribute performances and an article in the New York Times that asked 25 musicians what the album means to them.

“I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy. Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell,” says Mitchell.

Over more than five decades, music lovers have felt the power of her sung words. If you don’t know these lines, you should definitely look up the songs:

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all”

— “Both Sides Now”

“We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”

— ”Woodstock”

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”

— ”Big Yellow Taxi”

The nine-time Grammy winner was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta, Canada. Mitchell was stricken with polio at 9 years old and bedridden for a long period. Music and singing were her comforts at that time and never left her. She was attending art college for painting when she became pregnant by her boyfriend, who then left her. She gave her daughter up for adoption, a loss echoed in her songwriting, and specifically in the heartbreaking “Little Green”. She later married another student and her first singing partner, Chuck Mitchell, who had a habit of disparaging her intelligence. They toured coffee houses and other small venues in the United States, but after two years, she left Chuck, went to New York, and began performing solo and honing her songwriting skills. Before recording her first album in 1968, Sounds of the Seagull, she also wrote songs for others, like “Both Sides Now”, which was first recorded by Judy Collins.

Mitchell was married to musician and Grammy winner Larry Klein from 1982 to 1994. In 2000, she reunited with the daughter she had given up and has remained in contact with her. Critical of the corporate culture of the music industry, she stopped touring and released her last album of original songs, Shine, in 2007. She had a brain aneurysm in 2015 but made a recovery and appeared on stage at the end of a star-studded anniversary performance celebrating her 75th birthday in 2018. You can be sure she is very involved in her comprehensive website.

For her timeless, evocative music and her place as a role model for women singers and songwriters determined to control their own artistic vision, we salute Joni Mitchell as our Avenger of the Week.

Painter and singer-songwriter @jonimitchell is @GenderAvenger's #AvengerOfTheWeek. Starting out in the 60s and 70s, she developed and controlled her artistic vision in ways few women could, standing as an inspiration for artists everywhere. #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avenger-of-the-week-joni-mitchell