The artist who changed how Joni Mitchell played guitar: “An influence in that department”
Deeply embedded into the folk scene of the 1960s, Joni Mitchell not only influenced the peers around her at the time, but has influenced people ever since. Mostly revered for her songwriting, it’s her guitar playing that makes her truly special.
As one of the most unique players of her era, Mitchell’s tunings and her choice of guitars, often playing with nylon strings or even only four of them, colour her work. Without those details, her early works would still be magical because of her words, but they might not be quite so hypnotic.
However, we tend to assume that those who inspire us are not inspired. We put someone on the god tier and assume that nothing and no one is above them, as if they were the ultimate starting point of the stream of influence. They’re the spring where it all starts. But it doesn’t work like that.
You’ll find that all the best musicians are passionate music fans too. They’re at gigs, listening to albums, staying engaged with their scene. In particular, that’s part of the reason why the 1960s folk crowd became so powerful as they were mixing socially too, sharing ideas and all influencing each other.
The connection between Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was a particularly fruitful one as at different times, in different ways, Mitchell was influenced by each and every one of them. Crosby helped her get started, her relationship with Nash gave her some of her best songs, even in recent years, Young’s vocal protesting clearly inspired Mitchell. But when it comes to Stephen Stills, she admitted that he outright changed the way she played.
“I thought that slap came purely from the dulcimer until I saw a television show [recently] that I did the day after Woodstock, where Crosby, Nash, and Stills showed up,” Mitchell said in 1996 in an interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine, where she was unpacking her own processes and techniques to playing. Recalling this moment where she watched on fascinated, she realised that actually, the sound she’d liked came direct from the six-string.
“Stephen slapped his guitar, which is a kind of flamenco way of playing it,” she said, witnessing this different and simple way of getting something different from the instrument. Suddenly, a new way to get a new texture was revealed to her, and she was using it.
From then on, you can hear it in her work. On Blue especially, that slap sound comes up a lot. It’s heard in ‘All I Want’ and ‘Case of You’, and there are moments of it in ‘Coyote’. It’s part of the way her playing takes on a one-woman-band sound where it comes through so much richer and fuller than anyone would ever imagine a single person with an acoustic guitar good.
But according to Mitchell, that all comes from her friend. “So l would have to cite Stephen Stills also as an influence in that department,” she said in that interview, proving that even the most inspiring were once the inspired.
