IIn November 1953, shortly after her tenth birthday, Joni Mitchell was flown to a hospital in Saskatoon with symptoms of paralysis. Canada has just been hit by a polio epidemic, and a virus vaccine won’t be available until a year and a half later. The doctors prescribe absolute bed rest to the patient, too much exercise could mean a life in a wheelchair. During the day, Mitchell will later say, everyday hospital life was still bearable, “but at night you could hear it, the iron lungs. This wheezing breathing (…). If the disease spread to the lungs, you came into the iron lungs, because then you needed this mechanical help. And once you were inside, it was quite possible that you would never get out again. “
Mitchell came out. Her legs and lungs remained undamaged for the time being, even if she should soon maltreat the latter with four packs of cigarettes a day. Before that, however, she had to endure several months of inpatient isolation in which her parents hardly visited her. David Yaffe, literary scholar at the University of Syracuse, sees this experience as the origin of Mitchell’s lonely resilience, a lifelong resistance to authority figures, dominant lovers or people in the music business.
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When her debut album “Song to a Seagull” was released in 1968, Mitchell had had a disastrous marriage, from which she took only one last name, and the birth of a daughter from a previous relationship – the second event that shaped her life, as in songs like ” Little Green ”and“ Chinese Café / Unchained Melody ”can be heard. Mitchell had given the child up for adoption as a poor art college dropout who she was. The adoption papers noted: “Mother left Canada to pursue a career as a folk singer in the United States.” She became one, but she also became much more: a painter, jazz musician and pioneer of an entire pop decade.
Who needs a tonic?
“I have a perverse need for originality,” says Mitchell, “I’m not interested in imitators at all. I’m not a traditionalist. ”And even if the first albums were just that, Anglo-Saxon folk tradition, soundscapes in jazz colors followed in the 1970s with Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock and Jaco Pastorius, whose bass in“ Refuge of the Roads ” and “Hejira” sings the whale parts.
Yaffe tells Mitchell’s life as a prime example of inspired autodidactics. “From the very beginning of her writing,” says James Taylor, “she painted on a canvas that she raised herself.” It’s astonishing that Mitchell reads until her album “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” (1975) , with whom she completely left the folk sound, did not really know what a fundamental tone, what a tonic is. Her harmonious dexterity was obvious for a long time, you only hear the mysterious final chord of “Case of You” – an indent that has become music.
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