For anyone who knows folk music from the 1960s and ‘70s, Joni Mitchell needs no introduction. She is a singer-songwriter whose classic songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock” captured the idealism of the Baby Boomer generation and the hippy subculture..What people may not know is Joni Mitchell was born in Alberta and raised in rural Saskatchewan. A close look at her music and biography reveals just how much she was shaped by the Canadian Prairies — and by her persistent rejection of her conservative prairie upbringing..Yet, despite her lifelong attempt to get away from a rural lifestyle she considered too stifling and traditional, her music is also rife with longing for something like the hometown rootedness she left behind..Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort MacLeod, Alta. in 1943. She was the only child of William Anderson (a former RCAF pilot turned grocer) and Myrtle McKee (a teacher turned homemaker). Joni spent her earliest years in a Saskatchewan village called Maidstone, which is about halfway between Lloydminster and North Battleford. Joni’s family moved to Saskatoon when she was 11, and she would spend her teen years and early adulthood there. Down by the banks of the majestic South Saskatchewan River, Joni and her friends would have hotdog roasts, drink beer, and play little songs on her ukulele..But as a young adult with artistic ambitions, Joni wanted nothing more than to get away from a Prairie life she thought was only holding her back. Biographer David Yaffe summarized this period of Joni’s life as follows: “She was alone in a house with her simple and conservative parents, in a countryside whose beauty she embraced and whose provincialism she abhorred.” She wanted to be a painter at the time. In 1964, she enrolled in an art program at the Alberta College of Art and Design (now Alberta University of the Arts) and packed her bags for Calgary..Calgary was a transformative place for young Joni. She arrived in Calgary as an aspiring painter, but she left as an aspiring musician and singer-songwriter. Calgary was where she first learned how to play the guitar and where she performed her first music gig, at a café downtown called “The Depression.” Her time in Calgary would come to an early end, however, when she got pregnant by a local guy who had no intention of sticking around and raising a child with her. Fearing what her conservative parents would say if they found out, she dropped out of art school and moved to Toronto where she put her baby girl up for adoption (mother and daughter would later find each other and finally meet in 1997)..In Toronto in 1965, Joni met and married Chuck Mitchell, a musician from the US. Although their marriage lasted less than two years, it had three long-term impacts on Joni. First, it gave her the surname she would wear for the rest of her life. Second, it was her ticket to the United States which would become her main home base. And third, it made her work even harder to put her small town roots behind her — Chuck was about a decade older and more educated than her, a pretentious English major who thought he knew everything (you know the type). He often made Joni feel small by reminding her how much more he had read and experienced. Joni resented the fact that he thought of her as a “Prairie girl” from a “rube place.”.Joni’s first real musical success would come after moving to the States. Her much-beloved song “Both Sides Now” was recorded by Judy Collins in 1967, and by 1969 she had moved to California to join the budding hippy music scene. She soon became close friends with other accomplished rock and folk groups like the Mamas and the Papas, and artists like David Crosby and Graham Nash (who would form Crosby, Stills, and Nash in Joni’s living room). She contributed to the growing soundtrack of the anti-war movement with her song “The Fiddle and the Drum,” the environmental movement with “Big Yellow Taxi,” and the spiritual side of the hippy movement in “Woodstock.”.It was undoubtedly an exciting time, but Joni later recalled that it left her feeling empty. After experimenting with the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll that her new hippy friends had to offer, she later reflected, “Free love — now we know there’s no such thing. Pay later, always.” At the time she wrote her much-celebrated album “Blue” in 1970, she was struggling with depression, crying all the time, and haunted by strange dreams..There were small glimpses of real happiness in California, but Joni was constantly afraid of getting trapped in a life of domesticity. She developed a strong romantic relationship with fellow musician Graham Nash, who wrote the classic song “Our House” for her. The lyrics were inspired by their life together, sitting by the fireplace and writing love songs for each other. But Nash’s dream for a simple domestic life “with two cats in the yard” was a nightmare for the fiercely independent Joni. After Nash proposed marriage to her, she ran away on an impulsive trip to Greece where she broke up with him via telegram..One of the reasons Joni fought so hard against long-term relationships is because she believed her mother and grandmother felt trapped by their marriages, and she didn’t want to end up like them. In a song about her parents called “Tea Leaf Prophecy,” Joni describes their lives as dreadful and meaningless in a bitter land where “summer is just a sneeze in a long, long bad winter cold.” The song quotes her mother as repeatedly vowing to leave but never getting up the courage to do so: “She says, ‘I’m leaving here,’ but she don’t go.” While pining for another life, her mother is bound by her domestic chores, “Oh, what does it matter. The wash needs ironing and the fire needs stoking.”.And yet, Joni’s songs are full of regret for missed opportunities in love and home. In the melancholic Christmas song “River,” written shortly after her breakup with Nash, she laments, “I’m selfish and I’m sad, and I lost the best baby that I ever had,” concluding that she wishes she could escape it all by skating away on a frozen river. In “Song for Sharon,” written as a letter to a childhood friend, Joni contrasts herself with the friend who stayed in the small town:.“Sharon, you’ve got a husband.And a family and a farm.I’ve got the apple of temptation.And a diamond snake around my arm.”.What a contrast. Joni compares herself to Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the biblical Garden of Eden, losing the paradise of her upbringing by heeding the demands of a “diamond snake.”.Meanwhile, her childhood friend chose a life of marriage, a family, and a farm — Sharon never left the garden paradise of the Canadian Prairies. Joni invoked this biblical metaphor in several songs lamenting lost innocence. In “Paprika Plains” she says, “And just as Eve succumbed to reckless curiosity, I take my sharpest fingernail, and slash the globe to see…” In the song “Woodstock,” the chorus repeats “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”.Paradoxically, Joni would spend most of her life running away from the Canadian Prairies, while always longing for the kind of hometown rootedness it represented. Chasing the temptation of fame and fortune, she had become a fallen Eve longing to return “back to the garden.”.Perhaps there’s a lesson for us in Joni’s words of longing and regret. As Joni herself famously sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.”.James Forbes is the Western Heritage Columnist for the Western Standard
