Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Joni Mitchell, in her own words

Plus: was Mohammed Deif behind the 7 October attacks?

Joni Mitchell performing at the Gorge Amphitheatre, Washington, in June 2023. Photo: Gary Miller / Getty Images 
issue 11 November 2023

There’s always been something at once girlish and steely about Joni Mitchell, the stellar Canadian whom Rolling Stone called ‘one of the greatest songwriters ever’. As Radio 4’s Verbatim programme in honour of her 80th birthday reminds us, a stubborn hopefulness has carried her through turbulent times. Perhaps growing up in Saskatchewan, where winter temperatures drop to –30°C, put an early stiffener in her soul. When she contracted polio, aged nine, her mother braved the hospital ward in a mask to bring her bedridden daughter a small Christmas tree, but little Joni made a promise to the tree that she would walk sufficiently well again to be allowed back home for Christmas. This she managed. Before hitting ten, she took up smoking.

The joyous and irritable Mitchell has rarely seemed to care much what anyone else thinks

At 20, while a penniless art student, she realised she was pregnant by an ex-boyfriend: a disastrous event in the days when, in her words, an unmarried mother was seen as ‘a criminal, a fallen woman’.

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