Why did the songwriter behind "Blue" go through her own blue period?
And how has a mystery ailment kept one of the greatest musicians of the last century
from the stage?
Keep watching to learn tragic details about Joni Mitchell.
Born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in the tiny town of Fort Macleod in
Alberta, Canada, Joni Mitchell faced one of the greatest challenges of her life at an
early age.
At age nine, Mitchell contracted polio and was hospitalized during an outbreak.
Initially bedridden, a recovering Mitchell discovered her love of entertaining while
singing for convalescing patients.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Mitchell opened up about how the disease led to her
becoming a performer.
"I was nine, and they put me in a polio ward over Christmas.
They said I might not walk again and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas."
However, no one was going to dampen young Joni Mitchell's holiday cheer.
"So I started to sing Christmas carols, and I used to sing them real loud.
When the nurse came into the room I would sing louder.
[...] And I discovered I was a ham."
Ironically, Mitchell's bout with the crippling illness would influence her music in unforeseen
ways.
Unable to form conventional guitar chords because of weakness in her left hand, the
singer experimented with alternate tunings that have since become part of her signature
sound.
Free-thinking and artistic, teenage Joni Mitchell had little use for high school.
In 1979, she told Rolling Stone,
"The way I saw the educational system from an early age was that it taught you what to
think, not how to think."
Joni Mitchell's teen years also saw her running with a rough crowd.
Fortunately, she had the foresight to escape their influence.
"There also came a stage when my friends who were juvenile delinquents suddenly became
criminals.
They could go into very dull jobs or they could go into crime.
Crime is very romantic in your youth.
I suddenly thought, 'Here's where the romance ends.
I don't see myself in jail...'"
Joni Mitchell eventually earned her high school diploma by picking up her failing courses
in summer school.
Free of the academic constraints of high school, Mitchell was at last ready to embark on her
lifelong dream of becoming a painter.
"It would burn out my talent would have burnt out long ago I think as a writer or a musician
if it wasn't for the painting."
Working as a waitress, she earned enough money to begin her formal education in the visual
arts.
She enrolled in the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, where she excelled in her classes.
But, a year into her studies, she found the prevailing attitudes in art education just
as stifling as high school.
Not happy with the school's pigeonholing of students as either commercial or fine artists,
Mitchell dropped out.
In a 1976 interview archived at JoniMitchell.com, she explains her frustration with the art
school's focus on technical ability over creativity.
"I found that I was an honor student at art school for the same reason that I was a bad
student — an equal and opposite reason — because I had developed a lot of technical ability.
[...] So I became pretty disillusioned with art college, even though I enjoyed being near
the head of my class for the first time in my life."
Years later, Mitchell contends that art school had a negative effect on her painting.
"Some of my art education has been something that I've had to undo.
It's been a long time coming for me to find myself as a painter because I was educated
badly in that area."
While attending the Alberta College of Art, Joni Mitchell supported herself as a department
store model.
While pursuing her studies, she developed an interest in music and taught herself to
play guitar.
Soon, the struggling art student was supplementing her income performing in Alberta coffeehouses.
Around this time, Joni Mitchell had a tryst with a fellow artist named Brad MacMath.
Following the fling, Mitchell discovered that she was pregnant.
When MacMath found out, he abandoned Mitchell and left for California.
Virtually penniless and fearing her parents' scorn, she fled to Toronto to give birth to
the daughter she would name Kelly Dale Anderson.
Unable to provide for the child, Mitchell gave her up for adoption.
It was a decision that would haunt her and influence her music for the rest of her life,
per The New Yorker.
In an interview with CBC, Mitchell relates the circumstances of her pregnancy and took
issue with a commonly reported misconception:
"I see it written again and again that I gave up my daughter to further my career.
This is so wrong, there was no career."
Joni Mitchell met folk musician Chuck Mitchell in the spring of 1965.
Just 36 hours after meeting at Toronto's Penny Farthing Coffee House, the couple married.
Soon after, they began performing as a duo, singing in Detroit-area folk music venues
such as Chess Mate and The Raven Gallery.
However, the marriage was on shaky ground from the start.
Joni has since described her time with Chuck Mitchell as a "marriage of convenience" that
existed solely as a means for gaining custody of her daughter.
In 1997, she told the Los Angeles Times,
"One month into the marriage, he chickened out, I chickened out.
The marriage had no basis, except to provide a home for the baby."
Yet, Chuck Mitchell's failure to follow through with helping Joni reunite with her baby wasn't
their only source of marital strife.
Chuck, a well-educated man several years Joni's senior, often made her feel intellectually
inadequate.
As recounted in David Jaffe's 2017 biography "Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell,"
Joni once lamented that she was "illiterate" in comparison to Chuck.
However, there's little doubt that Chuck Mitchell's condescending attitude toward his young wife
was born from insecurity and the fact that she was rapidly outshining and outgrowing
him as a musician and songwriter.
By 1968, the marriage was over.
By the end of the '60s, Joni Mitchell's star was on the rise.
As her power as an artist grew, she also came into her own as a liberated woman.
She told biographer David Jaffe,
"I was in my mid-20s when I started to realize — with absolute exhilaration and a little
fear — that my life was not going to play out on the same traditional feminine timeline
as my mother and grandmothers."
Embracing the free love movement of the era, Mitchell left a string of famous paramours
in her wake.
In 1967, just prior to her divorce from Chuck Mitchell, she moved to L.A.'s Laurel Canyon
and began a relationship with David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
Soon after, she fell for Crosby's bandmate Graham Nash, with whom she seriously contemplated
marriage.
Throughout the 1970s, Mitchell was romantically linked with a number of famous men in the
entertainment industry including.
Along with a turbulent love life, success exposed Joni Mitchell to other excesses.
In 1975, while touring with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, Mitchell became addicted to
cocaine.
Although the drug fueled the writing of her 1976 album Hejira, it caused Mitchell to suffer
bouts of insomnia.
It would take her years to completely overcome her addiction.
Cited as an influential album by artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, Joni Mitchell's
fifth album, Blue, released in 1971, marked a turning point in her career.
Blue is, at times, painfully personal.
Rooted in Mitchell's depression, the album lays bare the whole of her turbulent life
with songs that detail everything, from her many fractured relationships to a veiled ode
to the child she gave up.
While recording Blue, Mitchell's melancholy seemed to imbue her with a nearly unbearable
sense of empathy and insight.
She told her biographer,
"I could see painfully — things about people I didn't want to know.
I'd just look at a person and I'd know too much about them that I didn't want to know.
And because everything was becoming transparent, I felt I must be transparent, and I cried.
That's how I felt.
Like my guts were on the outside.
I wrote 'Blue' in that condition."
Despite its highly confessional nature, Blue proved to be anything but cathartic for Mitchell.
Writing and recording and then performing the songs from the album night after night
in front of sold-out audiences took an emotional toll on the songwriter.
She told Marie Claire in a 2014 interview,
"Some people would call it a nervous breakdown, but I just hit that pocket that everyone does
on some point in their journey through their lives.
That identity crisis, that 'Who am I, really?'
If you're lucky, it hits you early, like me."
In 1974, Joni Mitchell released the album Court and Spark.
It was an instant hit.
Charming both fans and critics with such signature songs as "Help Me," her only Top 10 Billboard
single, Court and Spark was the pinnacle of Mitchell's commercial success.
Mitchell's next album, 1975's The Hissing of Summer Lawns, however, would mark a transition
to a more experimental, jazz-influenced sound.
Alienating longtime fans and confusing critics, the album took a drubbing from the press.
Rolling Stone praised the songwriting but lambasted the music, calling the album, quote,
"a great collection of pop poems with a distracting soundtrack."
Mitchell feared for her career.
In 1985, she told People,
"If they had just said they'd hated it, I could have taken it.
When other publications picked up the same attitude, I thought, 'I'll finish up this
contract and quit making records.'"
Still, the singer-songwriter would not be deterred in her pursuit of musical experimentation.
She told Rolling Stone in 1979,
"You have two options.
You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success.
They're going to crucify you for staying the same.
If you change, they're going to crucify you for changing.
[...] I'd rather be crucified for changing."
1982 would prove an important year for Joni Mitchell.
Entering her third decade in the music business, Mitchell took a break from jazz to explore
pop music for her 11th studio album, Wild Things Run Fast.
While recording the album, she met bassist Larry Klein, who would become instrumental
in shaping the album's direction.
The couple soon became romantically involved, and they married the same year.
Klein and Mitchell were a creative powerhouse.
Klein co-produced Mitchell's next album, 1985's Dog Eat Dog, which continued in the pop-oriented
direction of Wild Things Run Fast.
Yet, 1985 found Joni Mitchell in the midst of another personal tragedy.
Pregnant at 42, Mitchell miscarried in her first trimester.
Klein decided to keep a professional commitment, leaving his wife to deal with the aftermath
alone.
Later, Mitchell would claim that Klein's choice to prioritize business over her well-being
was a contributing factor to their divorce in 1994.
Still, Klein and Mitchell maintained an amicable relationship through their breakup.
Although their marriage was over, their creative partnership remained in full bloom.
Klein produced Mitchell's Grammy Award-winning album Turbulent Indigo, hailed by Rolling
Stone as her best album since the 1970s.
Regret over giving her daughter up for adoption in 1965 haunted Joni Mitchell her entire life.
In 1971, the singer-songwriter would memorialize the tragedy in the heartbreaking song "Little
Green" from her iconic album Blue.
Mitchell told the Los Angeles Times in 1997 that she "worried constantly" about her daughter
in the intervening years since their separation.
Though Mitchell kept her secret for decades, a former art school classmate sold the story
of her first pregnancy to a tabloid.
Although Mitchell had secretly searched for her daughter without success for years, this
betrayal by a one-time friend at last led to Mitchell's reunion with her long-lost daughter.
Around the same time, Kelly Dale Anderson, now known as Kilauren Gibb, was searching
for her birth parents.
Her research led her to the unmistakable conclusion that she was the daughter of Joni Mitchell.
Mother and daughter met for the first time in 1997 and enjoyed a few years of happiness
together.
However, their relationship soured.
In 2001, a physical altercation in which Mitchell allegedly slapped Gibb led to their estrangement.
By the next decade, though, Mitchell and Gibb seemed to be on the road to reconciliation.
Mitchell spoke about her relationship with her daughter in a 2013 interview with the
Toronto Star.
"She was pretty rough on me and conscripted my granddaughter, but we've worked through
all of that.
We reminisced about all the little tricks we pulled and the ways we can hurt each other.
That's over."
For years, Joni Mitchell has claimed to suffer from a little-understood malady known as Morgellons
Disease.
Described by the Mayo Clinic as a controversial, unexplained skin condition "characterized
by small fibers or other particles emerging from skin sores."
Medical experts disagree about the nature of the ailment and continue to debate whether
the disease even exists.
Mitchell opened up to the Los Angeles Times about her struggle with the mystery ailment
in 2010, saying
"I have this weird, incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space.
Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm:
they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral."
In March 2015, Joni Mitchell was found unconscious in her Los Angeles home.
The singer was committed to intensive care, where she underwent tests which revealed she
had suffered a crippling brain aneurysm.
Although an early report from musician David Crosby indicated that she couldn't speak,
Mitchell's representatives denied this, stating that she "was speaking, and speaking well"
but that she wasn't able to walk and would require extensive therapy.
Mitchell was soon well enough to return home, but her recovery is still ongoing.
Largely disappearing from the public eye for a while, the legendary performer has made
a few appearances in recent years.
A hopeful James Taylor, friend and collaborator to Mitchell, spoke about her with The Guardian
in early 2020,
"She's coming back — which is an amazing thing to be able to do — and I wonder what
she has to tell us about that."
"I've had a very interesting and a very challenging life but I have a tremendous will to live."
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite musicians are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.