Joni Mitchell Biography

Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943) is a noted Canadian musician, songwriter, and painter.

Mitchell's musical career began in small nightclubs and busking on the streets of Toronto and in her native Western Canada. She subsequently became associated with the burgeoning folk music scene of the mid-1960s in New York City. Mitchell achieved her greatest fame in the early 1970s and was considered a key part of the Southern California folk rock scene. Throughout the 1970s, she explored and combined the pop and jazz genres. Mitchell has amassed a body of work that is highly respected, especially by fellow musicians. Retrospective appraisals of Mitchell's work have often labeled her the "female Bob Dylan", [1] [2], but Mitchell has rejected that comparison.

Mitchell is also an accomplished artist. She has, through photography or painting, created the artwork for each of her albums and has described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance." A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell has stopped recording over the last several years and now focuses mainly on her visual art, although in October 2006 she announced that she is working on material for a new album.

The child of a grocer and a teacher, Mitchell was born and raised in Fort Macleod, Alberta until the age of nine, when the family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Mitchell considers her hometown. She began taking piano lessons at age seven, and immediately felt the creative instinct to write her own music. Meanwhile, she excelled at art in school, and a teacher who saw her talent in art suggested she should try music as well.

At the age of nine, she contracted polio but recovered after a stay in hospital. Her first performances were to other patients there. She also took up cigarette smoking at the same age, which may explain the unique texture to her voice, especially on her later albums.

As a teenager she taught herself guitar and ukulele and began performing at parties. This grew into busking and playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon. After finishing high school she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design for a year, but then left and returned to the coffeehouse scene.

As Mitchell prepared to leave her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto, she became pregnant. Seeing no other alternatives, she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson (born February 19, 1965), up for adoption. The experience remained a private part of her life during the ascendance of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably the song "Little Green," (from "Blue") and, years later, the song "Chinese Cafe" from "Wild Things Run Fast" ("Your kids are coming up straight/My child's a stranger/I bore her/But I could not raise her"). Her daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult, and the two were reunited in 1997. [3]

Mitchell was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1981 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. In 1995, she received Billboard's Century Award. In 1996 she was awarded the Polar Music Prize. Mitchell has sometimes objected to the way her legacy is described by critics, singling out in particular the "female Bob Dylan" moniker. "Being female creates a new category in some people's minds. No one would say that Dylan is the 'male Joni Mitchell.'"

(with U.S. chart positions)