She worked days at Simpsons-Sears department store to pay the rent. Playing the Toronto coffeehouse scene at night, she met folk singers Tom Rush and Chuck Mitchell. She married Mitchell in 1965 after a courtship that lasted 36 hours, according to one report. Rush and Mitchell would be the first of many singers to make standards of Mitchell's tunes.

The first of these, "The Circle Game," had become familiar to crowds in Toronto, and later Detroit, where the Mitchells moved, years before she recorded it. She wisely set up her own publishing company and named it after her own private mythology. "Siquomb" stood for "She Is Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty." Though the company was later renamed Crazy Crow Music, many of her loyal fans still describe Mitchell with her own fanciful acronym.

At night, after performing, the Mitchells hosted all-night poker games attended by Gordon Lightfoot and Sainte-Marie, but their marriage was crumbling. Joni left Chuck and moved to West 16th Street in New York, capturing her newfound sense of freedom on "Chelsea Morning": "The sun poured in like butterscotch and/Stuck to all my senses/Oh, won't you stay/We'll put on the day/And we'll talk in present tenses." Her idols began covering her songs, including Sainte-Marie ("The Circle Game") and Judy Collins, whose "Both Sides Now" became a Top 10 hit.

In 1967, country singer George Hamilton IV cut Mitchell's "Urge for Going," a moody song ostensibly about the loneliness of winter, inspired in 1965 by the diminishing opportunities for folk singers in the wake of Bob Dylan's famous electric conversion. "I get the urge for going/But I never seem to go," Mitchell wrote. Hamilton's version peaked at No. 7 on Billboard's country singles chart. (She didn't put the early tune on an album until "Hits," in 1996.)

Mitchell fled New York for California, settling in Laurel Canyon, a favored retreat of artists and musicians near Los Angeles. She met David Crosby, who later said, "Right away I felt as if I'd been hit by a hand grenade. Her voice, those words ... she nailed me to the back of the wall with two-inch spikes." When Mitchell began recording her first album for Reprise, new admirer Crosby was chosen to produce it.

As any guitar novice knows, fretted chords are the first enemies of the left hand, requiring dexterity and a strong index finger to stretch across and hold both the bass and high strings. Mitchell had found these chords especially challenging, but her solution to the problem transformed weakness into strength: "My left hand is somewhat clumsy because of polio. I had to simplify the shapes of the left hand, but I craved chordal movement that I couldn't get out of standard tuning without an extremely articulate left hand," she told Joe Smith in "Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music."

She learned open blues tunings in C and G, picked up D modal and began stitching chords together with interesting results. "The tunings were a godsend ... they made the guitar an unstable thing, but also an instrument of exploration, you could put the feeling into a new tuning, you had to rediscover the neck, you'd need to search out the chordal movement ... It was very exciting to discover my music. It still is, to this day."

As Acoustic Guitar magazine noted in 1996, "Her guitar doesn't really sound like a guitar ... A guitarist haunted by Mitchell's playing ... can't find much help in the music store in exploring that sound: what she plays, from the way she tunes her strings to the way she strokes them with her right hand, is utterly off the chart of how most of us approach the guitar." Her repertoire grew to encompass so many tunings, in fact, that Mitchell has long relied on an archivist, Joel Bernstein, to maintain the official book of tunings and chord shapes that individuate her songs; he even has to help her relearn some of the older tunes now and then.

Mitchell's first L.P., "Joni Mitchell" (often referred to as "Song to a Seagull" because of her cover painting), established her personal songwriting style and (encouraged by Crosby) unique arrangements. Boldly, it did not include her best-known material, but her follow-up album, "Clouds," featured "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides Now."

Mitchell recorded "Clouds" while living with new lover Graham Nash, who meanwhile was inspired by a day of antiquing with her to write "Our House" for his new band, Crosby, Stills and Nash. (In another example of Mitchell's knack for leaving art in the wake of her sometimes messy personal life, Crosby wrote the ethereal "Guinnevere" after she left him for Nash, though it was also said to be partly about his former girlfriend, to whom he was returning.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In 1969, Mitchell was invited to Woodstock, but because her handlers were afraid she'd miss a scheduled appearance on Dick Cavett's talk show the following Monday, she did not journey upstate. Yet her absence created a sense of longing that was essential in writing the festival's anthem.

She was stuck in a hotel room while her peers made history at Max Yasgur's farm: "The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock," she later recalled. "Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes and loaves story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable and there was a tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song 'Woodstock' out of these feelings, and the first three times I performed it in public, I burst into tears, because it brought back the intensity of the experience and was so moving."

Mitchell's absence from the festivities was more than a necessary irony. It symbolized the paradox at the root of Mitchell's art -- detachment coupled with an uncanny ability to connect. "The wonderful thing about being a successful playwright or an author," she told MacLean's magazine in 1974, is that "you still maintain your anonymity, which is important in order to be somewhat of a voyeur, to collect your observations for your material. And to suddenly often be the center of attention ... threatens the writer in me. The performer threatened the writer."

Recent Stories