Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell

[Tequila Revenge]

From today's, "The Writer's Almanac." http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

I'm pretty sure I read in one of Jimmy's books where he writes about sailing somplace listening to the new Joni Mitchell album. I think for singers and songwriters anything Joni releases becomes a mandatory listening assignment.

It's the birthday of singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell, born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod in Alberta, Canada (1943). As a kid, she got a bad case of polio, and in the hospital the staff told her she couldn't go home for Christmas, and she was so upset that she started singing Christmas carols at the top of her lungs, and she decided that she was a good performer. She recovered from the polio and taught herself to play the guitar by using a Pete Seeger instruction book.

She was going to be an artist, but after a year of college she changed her mind and headed to Toronto to try and make it as a singer, and it was on the train to Toronto that she wrote her first song. She had a slow start, performing in coffeehouses and writing songs for other people. But finally she made it as a singer, with songs like "Both Sides Now," "Carey," "Chelsea Morning," "Woodstock," and "Circle Game."

She said: "We Canadians are a bit more nosegay, more Old-Fashioned Bouquet than Americans. We're poets because we're such reminiscent kind of people. [...] My poetry is urbanized and Americanized, but my music is influenced by the prairies. When I was a kid, my mother used to take me out to the fields to teach me birdcalls. There was a lot of space behind individual sounds. People in the city are so accustomed to hearing a jumble of different sounds that when they come to making music, they fill it up with all sorts of different things."

[tikitatas]

I have always loved her musical talent, no matter where it took her. Happy Birthday, Joni.